Thomas McGuane: Nothing but Blue Skies

“Untouchable firetrap, Frank,” said Dick, backing off into the flow of pedestrians before continuing on his way. An exchange of waves and they parted into the sunny day. Frank thought about his insurance man; he’d known him for a long time. Dick had been a bassist in a local band, got his long hair cut off in 1980, then got in trouble for drugs, cleared that up, and when the Mission Mountain Band was wiped out, he took it as a sign that an era had ended and went looking for what was then known as a straight job. He had done well and now lived with his small family in Chokecherry Canyon. It was getting harder and harder to remember one’s old hippie friends as they disappeared into local society; but like them, Frank Copenhaver went on with the vaguely disreputable feeling acquired during those years, a feeling that later gave him a coolness, a detachment toward his adversaries. A refrain went through his mind from an old song: “It ain’t me, it ain’t me …”

Frank glanced at an architectural magazine on his desk — “Bogus Colonials Invade Boston” — and a sporting magazine with a story about a man who pitches camp on the drifting carcass of a dead whale, hoping to ambush a great white shark. Definitely have to have his outfit dry cleaned after that venture. Frank couldn’t bring himself to make his calls. I’m guilty, he was thinking. He dug into the morning news. Baby boomers were buying vintage guitars: bits of splintered lumber formerly owned by Pete Townshend, various “workhorse” Stratocasters, nostalgic early-middle-agers battling the Japanese for Buddy Holly’s Gibson, flame-patterned Les Paul models sailing across the Pacific to museums.

He went to the window. An old couple in the yard of the small house next door, now surrounded by offices like Frank’s, took in the midday sun. He had seen them before. They were very old, and she quite senile. The old man always wore a suit and his little wife a kind of sack dress, probably so that the weak old man could manage to pull it over her head when helping her dress. Frank observed while the old man slowly unwrapped a piece of candy for his wife. She watched patiently.

Frank went back to his desk. It was becoming hard for him not to think of work as something completely made up, no matter how remunerative. It seemed an excuse for not loafing. He was sometimes surprised everyone didn’t see through it. This was Gracie’s old pitch and he had never bought it. He had taken it that she was attacking his achievement. But it was time to go ahead and do something. The pork chop sandwich was starting to churn. He remembered that first trip down to Louisiana when he had taken a shit out his future in-laws’ upstairs window. He rested his hand on his stomach and thought about how Bunker Hunt used to bring his lunch in a brown bag, creating a reputation for penury, when in fact the bag was filled with the kind of gourmet items you couldn’t buy just anywhere. He picked up the phone and dialed Grant Weller, a cattle order buyer, and after a few formulaic remarks and parryings over price, bought another 500 six-hundred-pound steers, which he appended, with one more call, to the loan secured by his best property, his real trophy, the Alpenglow Clinic. He had a place to run them at ten bucks a head per month, about two bucks worse than he was doing with the Salvation Army. He needed to park them only a short while, until he could get them on feed.

“Good heavens. Where are these going?” asked his banker, George Carnahan, with a gasp.

“I’m going to background them at Mission Feeders. Call me for the deposits. Gotta go, bye.” He hung up, sat back and thought. He returned to the window. The old couple were gone. He could see the candy wrapper on the ground and walked out of his office into the hallway. He went down two doors and into the travel agency, waved to the secretary and went past to a smaller office.

Lucy Dyer was at her desk, didn’t really notice him in her doorway. The wall was covered with posters, tropical getaways for people in the extreme north. He always looked at the brown girl wearing little more than a dive watch under the waterfall in Kauai. Lucy had a long brown braid wound up behind her head and wore a navy blue jacket over a white open-throated silk shirt. Once when Frank worked on a road crew in Yellowstone, when he was young, a girl who looked like Lucy stopped in her convertible while a bulldozer crossed the road. They spoke briefly, Frank put down his shovel and got in the convertible. When he returned two weeks later, the job was gone. He could remember still the smell of the evergreens and dusty tar, hear the mountain stream that roared along that road, remember every instant of the two weeks. She was a lovely rich girl in her own Mustang convertible, but she did give him gonorrhea. He drove all the way to Laramie, Wyoming, to feel anonymous enough to see a doctor.

He sat down opposite Lucy and tilted slightly in his chair. He sighed and drifted forward in his imagination to winter, a scene in which one shoulders from the front door to the car through volumes of north wind. He rested on an image of jumper cable attachment, his imaginary self disappearing in the rooster tails of blowing snow that follow passing cars. Lucy was watching.

“How about a converted slave quarters on Nevis?”

“What month?”

“January.” She pushed a brochure at him.

“I don’t think so. I want something, I don’t know, something that would take me back to the glory days —”

“The early seventies.”

“But exactly.”

“How about a hammock on Cay Caulker, Belize?”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. It’s a straight shot across the gulf.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you could pick up an oldies station out of Houston.”

“Oh, Lucy.” He thought for a moment. “Is there a brochure?”

“I think that would be very much out of keeping with the spirit of my suggestion.”

“Quite right. How about the local weed?”

“I’m sure they can find you some…‘good shit.’ And if you like the hammock, you can always grow your own.”

“I see.”

The room fell quiet. A car antenna moved into view in the window, backed up and rotated to a stop. Something was coming up inside Frank. Voices outside, laughter, more voices, deals, assignations. I hope it goes on for a million years, thought Frank gratefully, defying gravity and cold. Now he was nervous. He thought about his mother on her last day in her own house. She had a purse that weighed about fifteen pounds that had a lock on it; she had lost the key to the lock long ago and carried this massive purse whose contents no one could any longer remember. She even took it with her when she sat down at the disc-driven grand piano, shouting, “It’s magic!” while the robot piano played Mozart like a barrel organ in a nightmare. It was a flat earth and they were all going off the edge.

“You’re never going to buy a trip from me,” said Lucy.

“I could,” he said and thought, Here it comes. We have these jokey meetings almost daily and they go nowhere. Because she was Gracie’s friend, I’m paralyzed to so much as ask her to dinner. We leave the lightest moments red-faced and sweating, out of fear one of us will ask, “What do you hear from Gracie?” You move toward something that could mean something and all it does is produce fear.

“You’re not like the others,” Lucy said. “You won’t go on a cruise. You don’t like other people well enough.”

“I deplore their eating habits.”

“You won’t go to the Bible lands.”

Frank reached across and covered Lucy’s hands with his own. “Not even Jesus had to worry about hijacking,” he said.

“What’s that have to do with it?”