Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

When they’d finished, Frank turned the weather off and got back into bed. They talked awhile about property. Frank said housing starts were way up in his part of the state. “The contractors who hung in during the eighties are really booked. Everybody’s working. We’re all trying to woo these new businesses, but our unemployment rates are so low and our warehouses so full, we know we’re askew on their shopping lists. I’ve got a little building I rent as a clinic-slash-boutique to four doctors.”

“Oh, that’s great.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just there at the Valley Hospital. It’s okay. I don’t pack anything home with me. I’m still in my hippie mode, down deep.”

“Were you a hippie?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Huh, so was I.”

“I mean, I was pretty motivated compared to some of them, but I consider myself an old hippie. What do you think I’m doing here?”

“People were doing this before the hippies.”

“Not with the same spirit,” said Elise. “I was hitchhiking around Europe, and in Italy they called us I amici di Liverpool , because they thought all the hippies came from Liverpool, kind of a hangover from the Beatles era.”

“I guess Italians get the news a little late.”

“They just get it when they want it …” She seemed to drift off and then spoke again. “What’s the policy on your toothbrush?”

“You can use it.”

“Mm.” He could feel her drift off, her back to him. He put his arms around her and thought about considering the weather with someone else … thundershowers in Indiana … lake effect … Then he thought, To be living.

He woke up in the dark. He was alone. That was probably why he woke up. The bathroom light was on. He made out a knee beyond the lighted doorway with the corner of a newspaper over it. He heard a deep, solid fart. He remembered a map-reading scene in a movie about the Civil War, when the noise of cannon fire was muted so you could hear the dialogue of strategy.

She sensed something. “Are you awake?”

“Just.”

“Is this your Journal ?”

“Yup.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It says, ‘Natural gas is the fuel of the future.’ ”

“I see.”

“It’s a joke,” Elise said. “I know you were awake when I made that little noise.”

“I’m afraid I was.”

“ ‘The 1990s were supposed to bring a golden era for the gas industry. Repeated threats of oil shortages, ever-toughening pollution laws and federal tax credits refunding up to seventy percent of exploration costs seemed to guarantee that gas would become the dominant fossil fuel.’ What do you think?”

“I don’t have a strong feeling about this one way or the other.”

“Yet you lay there like a secretive little mouse because I cut one lousy fart in the privacy of a motel bathroom.”

“I wasn’t being secretive. I was asleep.”

Elise came back to bed in a flood of warmth and immediately cuddled. “You married?”

“Separated.”

“Since when, since breakfast?”

“Long time. How about you?”

“Yup, nice husband, two nice kids, boys.”

“So, what’s this all about?”

“I belong to a dick-of-the-month club.”

“Seriously.”

“How should I know? You paddle out to the middle of a northern Montana lake to be alone and a decent-looking guy paddles out and rolls your raft. There’s nobody else out there. It’s determinism, it’s fate. Fate says: Put out, Elise. So, Elise puts out. You seemed to welcome the fate of Elise and its atmosphere of festivity. You seemed to salute the cheating heart of Elise.”

“This is an unusual thing for you?”

“Not particularly.”

“Was that your husband on the phone?”

“Nope.”

“What about the cancer?”

“That was pretty much true. I confess that it’s also sort of an unimpeachable excuse. But don’t you think that most personal freedom is built on other people’s misfortune?”

“Good grief.”

“I never look at a set of x-rays without being reminded how short life is. Lust follows. It’s like living in a city under siege. And here’s another weird thought: I’d hate to ever have to x-ray someone I’ve had sex with.”

A few minutes later, Frank let his eyes close. What an adorable woman, he thought, a little crush forming; so full of life and now asleep with an untroubled conscience. Her peace was catching and he was soon falling asleep with a feeling that was a lot like love.

In the morning, they got doughnuts and coffee from a gas station-convenience store. The sky was clear except for a huge white thunderhead to the west that caught a pink-orange effulgence from the morning sun. Elise slid into her yellow Jeep Cherokee. Traffic headed toward Flathead streamed past behind her. She nodded, smiled as if to say “yes” or “yep” or “uh-huh” and pulled into traffic. He knew she loved him too.

He finished his coffee and went back to the motel to check out. He felt a goofy pride to see the thrashed and discomposed bed. “Good job, Frank,” he said aloud, and climbed into the shower, letting the needles of hot water drive into his revitalized flesh. Then he shaved. Frank loved to shave. It was a daily challenge to get the little groove in his upper lip and to make the sideburns come out even. He had to stretch the skin of his neck to shave it smoothly, as it no longer stayed taut on its own. What difference does it make if my flesh is firm, he thought smugly, if they’re going to put out like that anyway? That simple fiesta of venery has restored me. I’m like the happy duck that spots the decoys.

He checked out and drove south toward Missoula, where he fancied the prospect of running into Gracie while he was detumescent, indifferent, superficially inquiring, amiable. The only thing new he had to talk about was whether or not he had lost his touch, and he didn’t expect to admit or say that.

There was a fair amount of traffic on 93. Summertime seemed to reveal the ranches along that route in all their nakedness: junk-filled yards, small corrals with a couple of steers or sheep in them, modest flower boxes, yards that seemed meant only for their occupants and not the careering tourists of 93. Huckleberry stands appeared between Whitefish and Kalispell, then, as he started down the fjord-like shores of Flathead Lake, stands selling the incomparable Flathead cherries, cars nosing out of steep lakeside driveways to peek onto the highway. A condominium rose next to its white reflection on the black, clean surface of the lake.

Frank pulled over and bought a couple of pounds of cherries and placed them on the seat next to him. He rolled the window down and spit the pits out as he drove until the hot buffeting wind made him feel deaf on that side. He rolled the window up and began spitting the pits onto the dashboard. He turned on the radio and listened to an old song called “Big John”: everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John. Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.

On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.” No one compares with this guy, thought Frank. I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it. Frank paused in his thinking, then realized he was suiting up for his arrival at Missoula. In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky, the voice of Sam Cooke: “But I do know that I love you.” Frank began to sweat. “And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be.” He turned off the radio, looked into the oncoming chrome grille of a White Freightliner and shouted, “My empire is falling!” Then he twisted the rearview mirror down so that he could study his own expressions. He now permitted himself to think about Gracie. He knew that she might be in Missoula and he wanted to be ready but he didn’t know how. He was nervous.