Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

He was going to have to use some power. He backed up and revved the diesel. “What are you going to do?” asked Lucy sharply over the roar of the engine. Frank engaged the gearbox and they leapt forward, up over the berm, and speared the truck with the steel forks. “Oh, no,” Frank said. He took it out of gear. The forks were buried clear to the hilt in the lower part of the door. He was sure some lever would get him out of this. He yanked back on the hydraulics and the truck began to rise, streaming mud and water from its undercarriage. Lucy let out a noise of despair as it lifted over them. By the time the skidder stopped lifting the truck, it was possible to see the chassis, the muffler and exhaust pipe. Lucy was still letting out an awful noise.

“This baby could end up in our laps,” Frank explained. He had to change the emphasis fast. He knelt on the floorboards and thrust his head up under Lucy’s dress. This usually gets them, he thought, and buried his face in her crotch. It was pure magic. Her dress seemed to light up around him. He could make out its flower pattern in a thrilling illumination. He could hear her voice, “Frank! Frank! Frank!” and felt her fingernails dig into his scalp. She wasn’t enjoying this. The thrashing got worse. Better have a look. He sat back on his haunches and threw the dress back over his head.

They had him in their high beams, Sheriff Hykema, Darryl and Darryl’s friend from the bar. Frank looked around like a blind possum, trying to process all this information. Lucy was pushing her dress between her knees as she sat on the tractor seat of the skidder. High overhead, Darryl’s pickup dropped clods of watery mud onto the engine-heated hood of the skidder. Frank stood slowly, held his hands up and surrendered.

It wasn’t until they reached town at sunrise, in all its harrowing colors, that Frank realized that Lucy too would be booked and jailed. Darryl followed them to town in his truck, which they had carried to dry ground with the skidder. When they reached the courthouse, Frank immediately began to bargain with Darryl. He would like to have kept this secret from the bland and somehow alarming sheriff, but it wasn’t possible. Darryl didn’t want to speak to him at all. Frank knew he’d have to go quickly to a viable offer. They wouldn’t even have had this moment if the sheriff had realized that a bargain was in the offing.

They were sitting in a room where Frank remembered taking a written test for his driver’s license. There was still an eye chart on the wall.

“Darryl, there’s no sense in my apologizing. Things just got away from us there, a man-versus-machine deal fueled by alcohol. I see this doesn’t strike you as funny. But … how many miles your outfit got on it?”

“Sixty-one thou.”

“You do take good care of it.”

“I did .”

Frank saw that he was touching a deep issue here. “Well, look here. Can’t I just take your truck and buy you a new one?”

Darryl looked over, right into his eyes. Welcome to the twilight world of prostitution yawning before you, thought Frank.

“New?”

“New.”

“And what do I have to do?”

“Drop the charges, hoss.” Frank could see the clenched motion in the sheriff’s shoulders from his seat in back. Lucy just watched things going by. There was a long silence from Darryl, not a sound. The sheriff looked at Frank. Frank would think about that gaze for a long time. He seemed to be taking in the long way Frank had fallen.

Lucy, Frank and Darryl got into Darryl’s truck. First, they went to Lucy’s house. She got out and in shame, rage or both, walked straight to her door without a word to either Frank or Darryl.

“I think she’s sore,” said Frank. He was getting depressed.

“Yeah.” Darryl looked depressed too. They sat for a moment in front of Lucy’s house, the truly ghastly colors of a new day rising behind the tall ash trees along the street, jerky bird movements among the branches.

Darryl said, “I wonder if there’s anything we could have said.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The whole thing is a bad deal.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Frank.

“Well, it wasn’t her fault.”

“Let’s get you your new truck. Maybe if I take a good hammering on that I’ll feel a little better. I’m almost suicidal.”

“You’re just sobering up.”

“There are a couple of other things.”

“They call it self-pity.”

“Okay, Darryl, I’ve got it coming.”

Darryl put it in gear and headed up the street to Frank’s house to get his checkbook. “I’ll just be a sec,” Frank said, and went in the house. He pulled out half the drawers in the kitchen before he found what he was looking for. He could have waited a bit and stopped at the office, but he knew Eileen was so demoralized that his appearance would have put her away. He also knew he couldn’t bring himself to break in a new secretary. But now he had the checkbook and went back outside.

Darryl was gone and a note fluttered on the sidewalk gate: “Forget it.”

He sat with his fishing tackle at the great corrugated base of a black cottonwood tree whose broad and leafy branches shaded an undercut run. He rolled over on his back and watched the big white clouds, barely moving toward the east, drifting on in a unit against the insistent deep blue of the sky. This seemed to him to be a grand and wholly acceptable arcade where his various sins were simply booths to be revisited with amusement. He wondered how Dante had failed to perfect one of his circles for the philandering sportsman: ravaged by his own hounds, flogged with his own fishing poles, dancing over his own buckshot. He joyously felt himself idling, an unreflective mood in which water was water, sky was sky, breeze was breeze. He knew it couldn’t last.

He got up and strung his rod together and in a minute he was in the river with a box of flies in his shirt pocket. He could barely sense his business behind him, spinning toward failure. He didn’t even have waders but was comfortable in the summer flow. The river was low and the gravel bars were prominent. He moved along until he could find some fish feeding. There was nothing going on where he had slept, in the deep run, though surely there were fish there. Nothing in the sparkling tail-out below the next big pool. But in a slender side channel he saw a string of fish feeding on flying ants.

Did he have a flying ant imitation in his fly box? He looked and yes, he did. He tied it on and made a very cautious presentation to the most downstream fish. The fish took in a silver swirl that faintly betrayed the colors of its flanks. Frank gave it some slack; the fish dropped back where it couldn’t scare its fellows and in a minute was in hand, an East Slope cutthroat, a rare bird on this river. He let that one go and eased up on the next and caught it, a little butterball brown trout that jumped four times. He hooked the next one; he could see it was a brown trout by the yellow flash as it took his fly down. A smart fish, it moved up through the others, scared them off, bolted and broke the fine leader.

Two hours had gone by. Frank crawled up on the bank, pushing his rod ahead of himself, and when on dry land, rolled over to face the sun and dry off. A slight shadow went through his mind as he reflected that this was Wednesday, conventionally viewed as a workday. But this soon passed. Work? The question chilled him. He’d better figure that out fast. He’d better work for something or quit taking up room. Though what was wrong with taking up room? He hadn’t asked to be put in this position. He was a byproduct of his parents’ sex life unless, given those austere times, he was the entire product. Hard to picture from the current carnival.