Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

He was surprised that, in view of his personal problems, he was so interested in the slowed sales growth of diet colas. He remembered 1982 as the year Diet Coke came on line, and 1984 as the year Diet Coke went to NutraSweet. His life must not have been perfect then, but now it was seriously imperfect and he focused on Clearly Canadian as the first beverage to identify some of the new energies out there, with mountain blackberry and orchard peach sodas sold in blue glass bottles that were heavy in the hand. A Pepsi spokesman stated in the Wall Street Journal that his company was not going to sit on the sidelines and watch the New Age go by without their participation. Besides, Pepsi was trying to find the right spin for their spokesperson Michael Jackson’s relentlessly grabbing his dick in his latest video. In a surprise move, Kraft, a division of Philip Morris, was testing canned cappuccino in Arizona. Frank sighed at these national battles, thinking of his reduction to hotel keeper for chickens. He didn’t feel that visiting these chickens with dick in hand would produce a national news conference and exploding chicken sales or he would have headed on over there and gotten down to business.

Someone was stirring around in the front office. Frank folded his paper and called out, “Yes? Can I help you?”

“Dad?”

“Holly? Hol, is that you?”

Frank went into the front office, once occupied by the hugely appreciated Eileen. Holly was standing there with her old high school girl grin. She was wearing a snap-button shirt and jeans with a scarf through the belt loops. The effect of the costume was a bit more “western” than Frank was accustomed to. He gave her a hug. Then she followed him into his office and allowed him to pull up a chair for her.

Holly had moved back into town. She was taking a semester off to be with Lane Lawlor. This was better for Lane’s contacts in the range livestock industry, and Lane felt he had timber products well covered. He was working as a lobbyist for “some people.” Frank tried to ask mildly, “Which people?” but it came out a little strong. They settled for “people.” Frank was seething.

“Have you seen Mama?”

“I have seen Mama,” said Frank.

“And?”

“We were, well, we had an unsuccessful luncheon.”

“An argument?”

“No, we just couldn’t get waited on. Then I got annoyed, and you know how she is about me being annoyed.”

“But that touches me.”

“What does, Hol?”

“You blowing your stack, Mama annoyed.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, in that sense it was like old times.”

Frank tried to make a couple of stacks of paper on his desk.

“Do you miss those times, Dad?”

“Every day,” Frank said.

“You do?”

“I do. I miss a lot of things. I miss you. My life is not in very good order.”

“I know.”

“Well, see, that embarrasses me too.”

“Don’t let it.”

“Some things get out of reach.” He was thinking that her proclivity for Lane Lawlor didn’t help.

“We read in the paper about your putting chickens in the Kid Royale Hotel.”

“Desperate strokes for desperate folks.”

“But Dad, where did that idea come from?”

“I didn’t originate it. They’ve done it in the East for years with old hotels. They’re really perfect chicken coops on an industrial scale. We think we can make money. It was a partnership I needed. I can’t really afford to restore the place.” Frank was conscious of talking too much. He could scarcely depict his pleasure in covering romance, from honeymoons to the Old West, with a thin layer of leveling chickenshit. He didn’t want to burrow around in all this anyway. He wanted to go fishing with Holly. He thought that if he couldn’t, he would suddenly die.

They stopped by the house to gather their tackle. Holly’s was still there. Lane didn’t fish; he was an elk hunter and in fact had made a bit of a name for himself through his marksmanship, picking off infected buffaloes on the border of Yellowstone Park. Frank, seeing Lane’s picture in the paper, thought that, in his knee-high lace-up boots, his broad Stetson and his red plaid coat, he had rather anticipated the photographer. Cuddling his rifle, he had made several articulate statements about the Constitution and its bearing on gun ownership. Lane knew his stuff, that was for sure.

It was a cool, pretty day and it seemed but a jaunt to get through the subdivisions, the more spacious acreages north of town with horses and, here and there, llamas in the yards. They passed low gumbo hills and wandered along the east branch of the Bridger River, then turned up the road to the creek where Holly had had such a triumph. Frank thought how much better it was to have done something together than to have spent all their energy in discussions. Today he hadn’t wanted to discuss his life, his marriage, his record as a parent. He had wanted to do something with Holly. Anything would have done — throwing a Frisbee, making chili, fishing.

They pulled into the brush so as not to make their poaching more conspicuous than necessary. Frank drew the old bamboo shafts of his Paul Young rod from the rod tube and smelled the varnish in the rod sack. He had owned the rod for thirty years and it had become too valuable to fish with, probably, but he fished with it anyway. Frank felt good standing next to Holly and rigging up. She doubled her fly line and ran it through the guides faster than he strung his rod, running the point of his leader through the guides. He opened the battered aluminum fly box that had been a gift from Gracie twenty years before and they looked into the compartments.

“We could wait and see if anything is hatching,” said Holly.

“I think it’s best to be prepared to cast upon arrival.”

“Give me a size sixteen blue-winged olive.”

“Hackled?”

“Please.”

He handed her a fly and said, “I know you’ve got your own, but I’ll spot you one.”

Frank tied on a 1930s Blackfoot River favorite called a Charlie’s special, which a friend in Missoula had tied for him. A note had come with the flies: “Excuse the sloppy job on these flies. The hackle was horrific. Every piece had a spiral stem. Must’ve come from some poor Indian chicken mutated by Bhopal.”

By the size of her trout on their last trip, Holly was entitled to lead the way. They pushed through the woods, Frank gingerly carrying his bamboo rod butt-first. There wasn’t the number of wildflowers there had been previously, but a splendid stand of bear grass revealed itself on an open hillside. They were almost head deep in the streamside grass before they broke through and found that the creek was gone.

In its place was a fetid mud channel beginning to crack in the sun. Where they stood in the middle of the channel, the banks rose high over their heads.

“Are we lost?” Frank asked.

“I don’t think so.”

They walked a short distance in the direction of what had been upstream, and Frank stopped. He said, “Right here is where you caught that fish.” He could see the deeply undercut bank, a cavernous space that had been an ideal chamber for a big fish to live in secretly. The ferns were dying on the banks, and here and there were the remains of fish, picked over by birds and raccoons. From the mud came an intense smell, undoubtedly from the millions of watery invertebrates that had lived there.

They walked on and reached a fence that now crossed above their heads. Passing under it, they came to the heart of a farm. They could make out the upper parts of barns and granaries and electrical poles. They climbed out onto the bank. From here, Frank could see what had happened. The Caterpillars with which the farmer had built up a broad dyke to impound the stream were parked nearby. The ruptured earth on the face of the berm still bore the blade marks; and the impoundment behind it continued to fill, so that the serviceberry bushes and aspens that were now half submerged were still alive. Bright new aluminum pipes for an advanced irrigation system were pyramided on low wagons. Frank had a brief impulse to put a good face on this. “Looks like we’ll have to find someplace else to fish.” Holly nodded. “Is this fella a friend of Lane’s?”