Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“We took you off the rolls. You’ll have to stop and let Eileen know. You deal with it.”

“Yeah.”

“And I’m not kidding. Mike and I are thinking about selling the place.” Why? thought Frank. Boyd could hold it together as an heirloom.

“Check with me first,” said Boyd. “You don’t need to be selling good land like that. You’ll piss it away.”

“You think so?”

“Hell, I know so.”

He phoned Saturday to see if Holly had arrived safely in Missoula. A man answered. “Just say her father called.” Frank had a feeling he’d encountered this bird once, a transfer from Colgate, shoulder-length curls and a nose ring. He had made a sardonic remark at the time, something about Missoula, something about the West Slope. It fell on its face.

Frank went outside and looked around at the street, with its operatic ascent to the south through shafts of light crisscrossing the maples. Cars seemed to coast around town, their motors ticking placidly. Their shapes and array of colors jumped and disappeared in the front windows of the houses. Students appeared at the crown of the hill on bicycles and plummeted heedlessly past, then on into town. The sidewalk climbed the hill in an erratic line, its track interrupted here and there by lilacs and caragana bushes.

He enumerated his obligations with the feeling that they kept him from soaring into this vista as one of its colors. Holly, easy. And Gracie — what obligation? He did not know. He had let slide Holly’s notation that Gracie was doing less than well. Bad luck or stewing in her own juices, he didn’t know. But Holly was going to see Gracie and that was exciting. Maybe she could help finalize the divorce and they could start to get past the pain.

He walked on down the street. Something useless about Saturday, a day of loathing to the self-employed. Eileen would be home taking care of her older sister, a woman afflicted with multiple sclerosis and a lack of funds. He passed St. Anne’s, his family church at the corner of Shoshone, and saw its door ajar, a dark band at the lintel with the glimmer of yellow interior lights. He stopped and went in, the old pull; he paused and was swept in as by a current. And then the smell of stone and old burnt incense, of the varnished pine pews, was comforting. He walked halfway up the middle aisle, genuflected and took a seat, gazing at the empty altar. He wondered if it was any different than the tumuli of Druids, fairie rings, sun dance circles, or if that in fact suggested a reduction. Maybe it expressed a zone of the subconscious that produced the murdering popes and ayatollahs. What if there was nothing there but the belief of many that there was something there? That certainly added to the importance of matters. He walked up and lit candles to his mother and father. He returned to his pew. Anybody here? Release the white bird now, please. Let a beam of light pass overhead. The faint voice of a bell. You see, we are desperate. We are here to say stone and water and sacrifice; house, crops, fish . And to say them plainly. To say Gracie .

He was sorry he included “fish” because it started him thinking on a lower plateau. He left the church and went to his house and began gathering his tackle. Inside an hour’s time, he was standing waist deep in the Gallatin River. Swallows dove just above his head, catching mayflies. Trout moved among the current seams like phantoms. Darkness would overtake him only a few yards from here, deep in a mystery.

Frank stopped at Valley News and bought the paper. There was a young man in front with long dirty dreadlocks. The well-bred golden retriever he held beside him on a length of clothesline looked hopelessly out into traffic.

Lucy passed in front of Valley News just as Frank came out with his paper. He nodded slightly. She nodded slightly, passed, stopped and came back. She looked handsome in a blue cotton skirt and oversize gray sweater. She said, “Frank.”

Frank said, “Lucy.” He wanted to be decent and let no smile cross his face. But he suddenly remembered going to a whorehouse in Livingston with Mike and hearing Mike’s voice boom out from behind a closed door, “Great Caesar’s ghost, it’s a cunt!” And now he began to laugh. He really ought not to remember any of Mike’s views on women, including the one that the only people who understood women were the Africans who practiced female circumcision, nipping off the clitoris with a clamshell. Mike would pantomime the action of the clamshell, like Señor Wences and Johnny.

“What are you laughing at?” she demanded.

“I had a completely inappropriate and unwelcome memory. I’m sorry. Lucy, have dinner with me.” He felt a little ashamed.

“This early?”

“I could eat.”

“I could too, I guess. Well, sure.”

“That’s good. Thank you, Lucy.”

“You’re welcome, Frank.” They went down the street to O’Nolan’s, a quiet, unpretentious place filled with well-educated nouveau Rockies people whose bland love of recreation fascinated Frank. They sat opposite each other, silently looking into their menus as though they were secret documents. They knew each other well enough to read their menus without nervous chatter or commentary on the offerings. Frank was feeling a weird flutter.

“It’s amazing this place is so busy at this hour,” said Lucy.

“They probably want to turn in early. Wild-mushroom seminar at daybreak.”

“What?”

“I’m surprised too.”

“Well, Frank, we left off on a sour note. But we’re mature people. I think we’re moving right along to a new tone and I find that very welcome.”

“Hear, hear. Nutone.”

“This is your treat, right?”

“Right.”

“May I say that I had no right to impose my romantic schemes without more input from you — please don’t make a rude joke about input.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

The waitress came and recited the specials. Frank had no interest in food. He wanted to say, Who gives a shit? He was always interested, though, in the way the waitresses could rattle off the specials along with a little description of the sauces and methods of preparation. And phrases like “ fines herbes ” and “ crème fraîche ” had a certain dorky melodiousness that seemed to work on the other diners and that Frank, therefore, wished would work on him. They did have a rib eye steak of splendid dimensions and he ordered that. He ate so fast that when he was in restaurants he had to order large-volume meals to avoid having a lot of time to kill. Lucy asked for a couple of the oddities. They also ordered drinks.

Frank made a mental note to watch the drinks closely so that some immensely complicated stirring of the old trouser worm didn’t get started. Lucy was very real to Frank. Sometimes women got so real you couldn’t have sex with them anymore: you and the real person had to get involved with some third entity to have the atmosphere of wished-for intensity. It could be a child or a business or pornography or the desire to do away with your people’s enemies. Prowling suburban couples ambushed unsuspecting individuals in off-color lash-ups. Car, rooftop or diving-board sex. Love that referred to something. “Love.” Frank sauntered through these notions in what he thought was a pleasant atmosphere.

“Frank?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t seem to have your attention, Frank.”

So, okay, how do you field this one. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Right, then. Say, what did I order?”

“A steak.”

“And you, dear?”

“Veal Bolognese.”

He knew very well this was not veal baloney. But a thought of a lone slice of flat meat, something isolated-looking even in a school lunch, went through his mind. “I’m looking forward to my steak,” said Frank. He thought of his cattle deal. He thought about the yearlings slowed to a stop by the depth of his Salvation Army lease grass. He saw those melting pounds forming along the calves’ ribs.