Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: “Give me water, my work is so hard.” What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead. Heading for a white world: polo shirts, imported beer. The back nine. Lawn care. Etiquette. Epstein-Barr. Then he thought with disturbance about trout fishing. Blacks didn’t seem to care about that. They liked fishing off bridges, though. It was hard to picture Otis Redding and Sam Cooke fishing off a bridge. Maybe they did before they were famous.

Holly’s apartment was on a small side street behind the university, about three blocks from the Clark Fork River. Frank first stopped at the river and watched it rush through town. There were some small trout dimpling along a speeding current seam about ten feet below traffic. Because of the previous night, Frank felt it was going to be out of the question to develop a truly huffy tone. But he meant to do his best. There were several cars parked in front: Holly’s green Civic, a well-kept old tan Mercedes 190SL and a National rental car with Utah plates. Next door, a pretty college girl was hanging out wet towels while a Louis Armstrong solo played its scratchy uproar from the windowsill. In the space between houses a steep hillside angled away, green and dotted with small white stones. Frank could smell the nearby paper mill and just make out the iron red top of a crane moving beyond the roofs of buildings. He felt faintly sick to his stomach.

The door to Holly’s apartment opened and instead of Holly, there was Gracie. That’s what he was afraid would happen. Frank was partway out of his car, still cushioned by the sounds of the radio as well as by the accidental moods of a neighborhood of temporary college housing; but it nearly stopped his heart, a feeling so intense it resembled fear more than anything else. He felt as if his brain were photographing everything in an exhausting superrealism that he couldn’t absorb. He was experiencing flu-like symptoms.

“Would it be better if I left?”

“As you wish, Gracie.” He could scarcely believe the bland tone of his voice.

“As I wish?”

“As you wish.”

“Okay, I’ll stay.”

For the second time in a weekend, Frank thought he had found himself in hailing distance of dramatic poontang. If nothing else, such a puerile thought was heartening in the face of his shakiness. He was swept under by self-contempt. He didn’t even have time to imagine who was the wronged party or, still worse, account for the water over the dam. He feared old rooted love more than anything else, blunt and tragic, like horrible news from the doctor.

“Gracie, how are you?” he asked, now at the door.

“I’m fine, Frank, and yourself?”

Bad English, thought Frank, but said, “I’m fine. Holly here?” Gracie sort of smelled his little thought and squinted before speaking. Her squint was perfect, eternal.

“Yes she is, Frank. And she’s with … Lane.”

“Who is Lane?” Frank asked, titrating just a bit of conspiratorial intimacy into his conversation. She stayed rigid. It didn’t appear she wanted much to do with him. He was a jerk.

“Lane is Holly’s gentleman friend. Shall we?” She backed away from the narrow screen door to let Frank into the hallway. Frank stepped in and then Gracie followed, a panicky situation in a small spot. There was a brass holder for umbrellas, to remind Frank that he was in a rainy area. Beyond a pair of divided-pane glass doors was the old parlor of the house, which Holly had furnished with junk shop furniture, including a folding card table, a cream-colored La-Z-Boy recliner, a television set with its futuristic insides exposed, cinderblock-and-board bookcases and a large public drinking fountain. On one wall was a poster so out of keeping that it startled Frank. It showed the bomber Enola Gay with the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima behind it, and underneath the legend “It’s Miller Time.” There was a miscellany of small, uncomfortable metal chairs in one of which, gesticulating feverishly, sat Holly, and in another a gaunt figure with a shock of gray curls, wearing a three-piece suit and lace-up cowboy packer boots, Lane Lawlor. He dressed the same way Frank’s grandfather had, only that was sixty years ago and the old fart had had a Maxwell touring car. Who was this costumed geezer courting his daughter? Frank wondered.

As he held out his paw, Lane Lawlor actually said to Frank, “Put ’er there.”

“Daddy,” said Holly, “this is Lane Lawlor.” She smoothed the front of her dress and shrugged up one shoulder. She shifted her look to Frank and said, “And Mama, she’s met.”

Gracie came in from behind and almost secretively found herself a chair. Everybody looked over at her and she reexplained, “We’ve met.”

Frank gazed at Gracie. Love had turned to rage. It came out in some rather sharp questioning of Lane.

“Where you from, Lane?”

“I’m from Fort Benton,” he said, “right where she all began.”

“Right where what all began?”

“The history of Montana, the fur trade and so on.”

“Oh, the white history of Montana.” This wasn’t quite fair, as it suggested subtextually that Frank spent a good bit of his time fighting for the rights of Indians. He really meant Otis Redding. “What’s your line of work?”

“Water.”

“A swimmer?”

“I’m an attorney. My practice is confined to water issues — apportionment, adjudication, priority and so on.”

“You’ve been at it several summers, I take it,” said Frank, allowing his eyes to drift to the gray curls.

“Sure,” said Lane, ready to take him on, which seemed to be looming.

Holly made a presentational gesture with both hands toward her mother. Her interest in Lane had made her into a bit of a simpleton. She had an expression of appalling devotion, a Nancy Reagan gaze directed at the side of his head. “Well, what do you think?” Holly asked.

“She looks well,” said Frank. He wasn’t controlling his projected tone very well. He was usually better at this. Either more was at stake or the background of his slipping business was seeping in. He tried it again. “She looks well.” This time it sounded as if he were saying she didn’t look well at all or was actually ugly.

“You look well too,” said Gracie.

“Thank you. Anytime.”

“Oooh,” said Gracie, and this almost got away from them. Holly was frozen. Frank noticed that Gracie was angry.

“You want to hear how we met?” Holly asked.

“Yuh,” said Frank. “How?”

“At a rally for We, Montana.”

“I’m terribly sorry, darling,” said Gracie, “but your father and I don’t know what that is.”

Despite his pleasure at Gracie’s figure of speech, Frank said grimly, “I know what it is.” We, Montana was an organization of citizens who hoped to keep any water from leaving the state, through the erection of dams and diversions. They had some reputed connection with the Posse Comitatus as well as the radical tax protesters of the Dakotas. They spoke to the press sardonically about their interest in “white water issues,” by which they meant water for white people. Frank especially remembered their Western Family archetypes: the John Wayne male and his bellicose, gun-toting woman, their cold-eyed, towheaded children.

“Then we started going to the pistol range together,” Holly said.

“Why were you going to the pistol range, darling?” asked Gracie.

“To be able to defend myself,” said Holly flatly. “I shoot two hundred rounds a week.”

“I never thought of you as being in danger,” said Frank.

“You’re not in danger,” said Holly, “until you develop a few convictions. I found that out. There are some very peculiar out-of-staters on campus that give you the feeling that happiness is a warm gun.”