Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

The worst was that he had been “meant” for someone and now he was not “meant” for anyone. His fear was that if he was not meant for any one , then it might follow that he wasn’t meant for any thing . He wasn’t a scientist or an artist. He was just a businessman, really. Still, he believed that he asked the big questions. He knew that scientists and artists believed that only they asked the big questions. They believed it was their job to ask the questions the answers to which the general population required for their well-being, but never asked themselves. Why? Because, it would seem to follow, the general population was too fucking stupid. This belief was behind the impression that artists and scientists often made among ordinary people, of being blowhards, or assholes. He admitted loving his bouts of brainlessness: the fish tight against the rod, the strange woman smiling across the corridor as the light from the Coke machine shone on her lipstick, the dog barking beyond the railroad tracks. When you analyzed something, it owned you. You ought, as the Bible suggested, to watch, and wait. Frank smiled at his own thoughts, rolled onto his stomach and watched the river.

By the time he got to the office, several things had changed. First, he had certainly come to realize that he was going to have to take hold of practical matters while he could. He pretended that his emotional hegira had been a kind of renewal, but his body and the vague feeling of being stunned denied that. He had evidently recovered his old abstracted yet purposeful self because his secretary had lost her sardonic aura and fell right in behind the renewal of his routines. There was a mausoleum tidiness about his desk that implied absence and neglect of business.

Second, he was coming down with something. Eileen told him it was going around. He felt shaky, and there was the sense that sweats were not far away. Aspirin was wearing off about every two hours but work had to be done. He began to look at his activities: his antagonizing the renters at the clinic, his gross failure to track the cattle market, his open boredom when talking about the fate of the family ranch. He felt he was awakening from hypnosis. What in God’s name could I have had in mind? he wondered.

And finally, he had learned in a phone call from his daughter, marked by a coolness he had never experienced from her before and which was so baffling to him that it had the effect of overshadowing the information it conveyed, that Gracie had returned to town and would be living on Third Street with her friend Edward. She, Holly, would be down for a visit, and to accompany Lane at one of his Brandings.

This made things neither better nor worse. Gracie had left him and the finality of that blow could not, he was sure, be increased by her being in town. At least he didn’t think so. There would be the pain of running into her. But how often did he run into anyone by accident? There would be a powerful temptation to slip over to her place at night and see what was going on. But he was going to stop all that, or if he didn’t stop, he would resume his observation of conventional families pursuing a long-shared idea in our country, one he had lost.

“Eileen, have you been following the fortunes of this Centennial Wolf Pack?”

“I think they killed them all except one.”

“ Who killed them all except one?”

“Whoever. They don’t know.”

“How many were there?” Frank asked.

“There were six, weren’t there? There was the black female, the mother — the one they called Alberta because that’s where she was supposed to come from. They shot her —”

“Who?”

“They don’t know,” Eileen said. “The senator said that environmentalists were shooting them to make ranchers look bad.”

“Then they poisoned the male, I believe. Two pups were shot off the highway. How many does that leave?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Copenhaver, they poisoned that other pup at the campground over in the Gallatin. I believe the senator explained that the Bozeman Girl Scout troop might’ve done that to help protect fawns. Although I heard the Girl Scouts denied it and their troop leader wasn’t real happy about the senator. So, there’s just one, and he’s this real silvery male they had on TV going across the Cayuse Hills. He’s almost grown. They’ve got a radio collar on him. Fish and Wildlife says he’s doing great.”

“He might be a little lonely, wouldn’t you think?”

“A wolf?”

“Anyway, I have a friend who’s been following the wolves. It’s a passion with her. I haven’t seen her in a while …”

Eileen looked on with vague incomprehension. She wasn’t big on these lateral, associative kinds of things. He’d been through this before. Anything beyond the declarative sentence aroused a suspicion in her that a plot was afoot. And in his case there was, a plot to locate Smokie.

“You don’t look very well, Mr. Copenhaver.”

“I’m afraid I’m just hanging on. But I can’t give in to it. I’ve neglected so much.”

“You have indeed,” said Eileen. “I’m very worried for my job.”

Frank took this in, looking at her to gauge the depth of her worry. But Eileen stranded him. She didn’t exactly wear her heart on her sleeve. Frank had a split second of admiring the consistency of her out-of-fashion clothing, eyeglasses that made her as unattractive as possible, pale plastic-rimmed things that were a pure optometric solution to seeing poorly.

“You won’t lose yours unless I lose mine,” said Frank heartily.

“That’s what I mean,” she said.

“I see,” said Frank. Once he saw this all from a great altitude. His benevolence in directing his widespread world was immediately accepted for the simple fact that he was in motion and provided a kind of leadership. He had learned that people will follow damn near any moving object, but that if it falters, they will quickly move to another moving object and follow that one. He once read an essay by Robert Benchley describing a newt falling head over heels in love with a pencil eraser because it resembled something in the mind of all newts. Frank once thought of this as a very complete description of human love.

Next Frank talked to John Coleman, his accountant, the man who once crowed, “You’re a success!” at the crossing of some threshold of net worth or another. He could tell that John was even more worried. Well, Frank was worried too. In fact, he knew so much more than John that he was inclined to overreact to John’s worry. John had a deep, measured voice that he cultivated purely for phone use. He rarely used that phone voice on Frank, but now he was, candidly nattering on about a few accounting strategies — he knew Frank was not interested. Evidently, he had bumped into Edward Ballantine on the street and gotten some very aggressive questioning as to whether Frank was deliberately devaluing his estate by way of anticipating his divorce. All that was meant to say was that this was now street knowledge and, accurate or inaccurate, it was hardly a salubrious business climate.

“Frank,” he said, “I think you are perilously close to failure.” This would have had greater effect if John hadn’t used the phone voice, but it had some effect. “If a divorce is impending, then what I say is certainly true.”

Frank didn’t want to let any of these people get to him. “I think I’m coming down with something,” he said.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“I mean a bug. I got a flu shot but this one flies below radar.”

“Failure,” said John. “It’s almost like getting killed.”

When he got off the phone, Frank tried to think about having nothing and couldn’t respond to the idea. He’d had prosperity for a good little while now and obviously it hadn’t done enough for him to form a background for terror when he contemplated its absence. He tried it on himself: “I am a failure.” Nothing.