Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

It was interesting to ponder the meat color of the arm-spread man in the anatomy poster. He looked at all the little parts doctors have to memorize or they don’t graduate. This poster was supplied by the makers of Valium and this big muscular fellow with the cutaway face that seemed like a fierce smile didn’t look like he was the tranquilizer sort. Yet no one was above tranquility, however it was achieved. Frank imagined that this was Holly’s boyfriend, flayed for science, howling at the very movement of air, cradle robbing the baldest crime.

Frank sensed that he was not alone. He listened and heard someone walking in a neighboring office, more than one person. He opened his door an inch or two and watched. In a moment, he made out the forms of men carrying out the scales — the doctors, in jogging spandex. He couldn’t quite remember who actually owned the scales and so he hesitated before stepping into the corridor, but finally he did emerge and the doctors hesitated for a second, played it as if they knew he was there all along. Then when they steadied the scales on their shoulders, the weights ran across the bars and clattered to a stop, and Dr. Frame said, “Frank.”

“Get ’er all, boys,” said Frank. “She’ll never be a clinic again.”

Dr. Jensen said from beneath his bangs, “We’ll only get what belongs to us.”

“My lucky day,” said Frank. He waved them on in their work and seemed to mean it.

He drove five hard hours to Whitefish, where he took a room on the lake. For most of the next day he watched the cat’s-paws move across the blue water and listened to a train travel through the woods above the dark, stony beach. He lay out on the dock and watched the cutthroats fin around the pilings. There were numerous smoke-blackened fireworks fragments and Frank, lying face down with his nose between the boards, smelled gunpowder. He loved that smell. He occasionally thought it would be pleasing to shoot several people in particular, accompanied as that would be by this fine smell. A plane went by overhead; no reason he couldn’t be in that plane. A boat glided past and there was no reason he couldn’t be on that boat.

Just at sundown he paddled a floating cushion out to the middle of the lake, legs dangling in the cool green water, where he met a radiologist, a woman in her forties, also on a cushion, hers with parti-colored seahorses and an inflated pillow. She worked in Kalispell and came here, she said, anytime she found a cancer, to float between earth and sky and to sustain, on her seahorse floatie, a sense of deep time that could accommodate life and death. Frank looked at her long, melancholy face with its thick, seemingly puffy lips, stringy hair and short square brow and said, “You have a hard job.”

She took a moment to consider. “Yes I do. My job is to search for something I hope I don’t find. That is a hard job, mister.”

Darkness seemed to be forming, a circle of contracting shadows from the shoreline and faint stars overhead. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and when Frank reached out to take the tip of the radiologist’s finger, he was able to draw her raft to him with an ounce of pressure. Her face was now an inch away and they both moved imperceptibly toward each other to kiss. Her mouth was open and he tasted a mentholated cough drop. He slipped his hand a small distance inside the top of her bathing suit and felt a hard nipple. He opened his eyes and thought he could make out trembling water around her raft. The bottom of her bathing suit was drawn across the points of her hips and a flat stomach.

Very quietly, Frank moved to board the radiologist’s raft, a delicate matter that worked, right up to the point that it didn’t work; and with a sudden rotary motion the radiologist shot out of sight. “Hey!” Frank shouted impulsively, and trod water between the plunging shapes of the floaties. He felt the radiologist’s head under the arch of his foot and struggled to get a hold of her. She came up spraying water from her mouth and with a minimum of floundering she got onto her raft again, on her stomach, and began to paddle toward shore. Frank followed her.

“What’s your prob lem?” she said when he overtook her.

“Same problem as everybody else.”

“Oh, this’ll be good,” she said. “What is it?”

“I’m just trying to get some meaning in my life.” Frank felt he was leaping from line to line.

“Ha, ha.”

They walked together along the railroad track in the last light. There was enough curve in the lakeside route that the rails were always disappearing on the geometry of creosote sleepers just ahead in the woods. Honeysuckle grew wild down the steep banks where lake water glimmered through the trunks of tall old pines. Elise, that was her name, chatted along amiably and was very good at naming the birds they saw — the chipping sparrows, the yellowthroats, the kinglets. There was something about the way she touched her fingertip to the droplets of resin on the pine bark that made Frank think, I may be headed for a world of poontang.

In Frank’s room, she peered examiningly at his cock. “The baleful instrument of procreation. Ooh,” she said, squeezing hard, “I can tell I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you having a nice time?” she asked.

“Like my grandpa used to say, ‘If this ain’t it, you can mail mine.’ ”

They kissed and she slipped a cough drop from her mouth into his; it was like a cool breeze. He slid down the length of her and, spanning the backs of her knees with his hands, licked deep into her. She moaned, then jumped out of bed and ran around the furniture. “That cough drop has set me on fire!” she hollered, and went into the bathroom. He heard her running the water and tried to decide what to do with the cough drop. Finally, he spit it down the wall behind the bed. He tried to blot his tongue on the wallpaper. She came back in with a washcloth clamped to her crotch, got into bed and sent the cloth back toward the bathroom with a kind of hook shot.

“Just quit pussyfooting around,” she said, “and stick it in.”

She had a long, firm body that she must have worked hard to keep in such shape, and she flung it around with great confidence in its appearance. Frank hadn’t made such buoyant love in memory. He got happier and happier until he wondered briefly if her energy was connected by some means to having found a cancer that day. He felt exultant and did not consider asking about it.

Then, when they were through, he did think about that. Lying there, he must have been looking off and she caught it, scrutinizing him. The room was silent. She leaned across him, picked up the phone and dialed. After a moment, she spoke. She just said, “Hi.” Then the other person spoke. Then she said, “Sorry, I couldn’t make it,” and hung up. It was out of the question to ask who was on the other end; something in the flat way she spoke made Frank know that she was supposed to have been fucking this other person and not over here at the lake fucking him.

It was late and the only thing they could get was the weather channel. Elise was smart and it was fun to talk to her about the possibilities of weather. There was a stalled-out high where they were and they could see it on the national weather map. Elise knew where it was going to go when it began to move; it was headed for the Dakotas. She stood naked beside the television set and pointed to where it was going. Their drought was over but it looked like others’ had just begun. She came back to bed. Frank could see where the heat spread west from Bullhead City, Arizona, then hit a kind of Pacific wall and stalled, rising slowly up the coast of California … She had her mouth on him now and the antics of the weatherman with his pointer didn’t make any sense at all.