Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“Run up some bills.”

“I’m not saying it’s a way to cut costs in a relationship.”

“My wife and I don’t have that kind of money,” Phil said. “We’re old-fashioned. We’d just like to kill each other.”

“The last time I felt really close to Gracie, well, we were going to open a burger joint, something different, something with a slogan, and what it was going to be about was volume sales. I was just thinking numbers. But Gracie, who’s a great cook, thinks whatever you do should be good for the world, whereas I just like business. And I honestly mean it when I say that when Amazing Grease went upside down I didn’t gloat because she did serve really distinctive food while it lasted. And it was like anything she did for good reasons was doomed and anything I do for my usual money-grubbing motives would succeed. It was really humiliating to Gracie. We never actually said it. It was like her view of life was nowhere because she couldn’t face what a paltry, hopeless deal it was and I could. But the funny thing is, since she withdrew in defeat and just let the lesson speak for itself, I haven’t been able to do as well either. Or I don’t want to. Or I fail to see what it means. Or, whatever.”

Phil wore a pinched, inward look. He had both hands around his drink. He seemed to be watching something inside himself. He lifted the drink up and finished it. “I gotta go,” he said.

“Phil, is everything okay?”

Phil was up and next to the door. “I really can’t answer that question.”

Frank knew better than to follow him out the door. Instead, he brought the television in so he could see it while he ate. The Broncos. Elway goes back, back, uncorks a Hail Mary … incomplete. He finished his drink and made one more because he could just begin to feel that good old mellow feeling: the coexistence of life’s elements as so successfully seen through the bottom of a glass. He smiled at the wholesome chili. He thought with sweet sadness of his pain and Phil’s pain, all the while knowing they were learning something important. He forgot the overpowering sense that nothing is learned, that this is a circle and a headache in which the nerves of the abdomen are counterweighted by the capacity for remorse. For example, he contemplated with a faint, annunciatory smile the idea that nothing really was important.

The wind had swung around to the northwest and the bright summer clouds were replaced by the slanting, lead-shot systems of somewhere over the Divide. It was still warm, but for the first time they were getting other people’s weather. Frank wondered if he was imagining a bustling, slightly worried quality of people in the street. For his own part, he craved to be out in the country.

He might only have wished to escape. The bank had begun proceedings against him and had suggested that he might “opt for the quiet alternative” and hand over several things that they had identified, including his house. The house’s value increased suddenly to him. It had belonged to his grandfather. His father had sold it and Frank bought it back twenty years later. In the meanwhile, it had become a duplex. Frank and Gracie converted it back into a single-family home and raised Holly in its multiplicity of steam-heated rooms. The old house had seen some unhappy moments, but Frank thought there was a chance that things would change, and he still wanted to hang on to it in case they did. He did not necessarily hope that he and Gracie would get back together but that he would find some accommodation with his situation and that would approximate happiness, or absorption in something, maybe a renewed absorption in business. But the bank going after his home affected him viscerally.

His success had once consisted in an ability to mix himself in the throng wholeheartedly while maintaining a kind of detachment that told him what the general currents were in what seemed to be pure Brownian movement. For example, he long knew where people were getting ready to move to. When they got there, they’d find he owned much of the land and would have to buy it from him. He had built the clinic before there were enough doctors to fill it. They were still coming to ski or fish from their homes and practices in Texas, California and New York. He knew they were getting ready to move; they didn’t. As people relatively exalted in their own minds, they resented his having foreseen this. A few tried renting offices or practicing out of private dwellings. It didn’t last. They ended up renting from him.

Something about professionals made Frank enjoy gouging them, a quality in himself that explained the popularity of people like Lane Lawlor. It was interesting to see what it would take to get the doctors to band together and build their own clinic. Now the bastards were gone. Still, it was zoned light industrial over there. He was thinking of moving a little electronics thing in from its dismal headquarters in Three Forks; they made position-indicating radio beacons to be worn by skiers in avalanche areas, a little like the one worn by that poor old wolf. It was a good product, but he just didn’t care right now. He had no idea where people were headed or what they wanted. He was like a hawk that was losing its eyesight.

He tried an experimental weekend at the ranch. He fully expected to find ghosts there, of his family and himself; but what he found was that it was empty except for Boyd Jarrell, who was back at his old job. Boyd actually waved to him, though it was a dismissive wave, as he dragged a set of tractor chains from the barn. Everything was familiar but it was without any further resonance. He could locate, room by room, scenes of important early events, but they not only failed to enhance those memories, they reduced them. The room off the kitchen with the ironing board mounted to the wall, where his father had had his first heart attack, was just a cold, empty room. It seemed insufficiently inviting to accommodate a heart attack. The front room, where as a family they had watched Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, failed to bring back memories. To Frank’s dismay, it only brought back memories of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

The attic contained two Flexible Flyer sleds and the camping equipment that had gotten such complete use. Frank’s father was a skillful packer of horses and the outings with his sons were lessons in diamond hitches and squaw hitches, demonstrations of the driving of a picket pin and of jackknife cookery, mantying gear, Decker versus sawbuck pack saddles and the language of trailblazing. Frank recognized his gratitude now. How much better to recall a parent in action than in statements. In fact, most of the statements Frank remembered from his father, he remembered unhappily. The actions he remembered were among his treasures.

Mike had sold off the timber. He had that right under their partnership agreement: Frank had the grazing, Mike had the timber. Frank had leased his grazing and Mike was now irrevocably cutting down the trees. Through the long weekend, Frank listened to the hot-rod snarl of the chain saws. It took many years for those trees to stand up like that and just a minute to be killed. From the house, Frank could see parts of the bristled surface of forest above the ranch folded over flat. He could hear the skidder making its terrible sound in the living trees and he could see smoke from the trucks. He could even see the safety orange of the hard hats. More than anything, he heard the doleful howl of the saws in the shattered forest. He knew how the soil would be rent in hauling off the trees and decided to skip that part and go back into town. It was probably time, he thought, for Americans to learn to love pavement with all their hearts.