Thomas McGuane: Crow Fair: Stories

When I was fourteen, my mother said, “Do you know why your father works so hard?”

I thought I was about to get a virtue speech. I said, “No.”

She said, “He works so hard because he’s crazy.” She never elaborated on this but left it in play, and it has remained with me for more than a quarter of a century.

The only time my father ever hit me was when I was fifteen and he asked if I was aware of all the things he and my mother had done for me. I said, “Do you have a chart I could point to?” and he popped me square on the nose, which bled copiously while he ran for a box of Kleenex. His worst condemnation of me was when he’d mutter, “If you’d been in my platoon …” a sentence he always left unfinished.

My mother was a scientist; she worked in an infectious-disease lab until my father’s financial success made her income unnecessary. Even then, she went on buying things on time, making down payments, anxiety from their poorer days leading her to believe that she wouldn’t live long enough to pay off her debts, even with her Coca-Cola money. Once they were comfortable with affluence, they became party people, went to the tropics, brought back mounted fish, and listened to Spanish tapes in the car. But they were never truly comfortable away from the smoke and rust of their hometown.

The last year I lived with them, my father came to the bizarre conclusion that he lacked self-esteem, and he bought a self-help program that he was meant to listen to through headphones as he slept. From my bedroom, I could hear odd murmurings from this device attached to his sleeping head: “You are the greatest, you are the greatest. Look around you — it’s a beautiful day.” You can’t make this shit up.

We were nearly done with the plastic surgeon’s vacation home. I had a big crew there, and everyone was nervous about whether we’d have someplace to go next. We had remodels coming up, and a good shot at condominiumizing the old Fairweather Hotel in town, but nothing for sure. I met with Dr. Hadley to lay out the basement media room. He was a small man in a blazer and bow tie, bald on top but with long hair to his collar. I asked him, “Are you sure you want this? You have beautiful views.” Indeed, he had a whole cordillera stretched across his living-room window. He was gazing around the space we were inspecting, at the bottom of some temporary wooden stairs. Push brooms stood in a pile of drywall scraps in the corner. There was a smell of plaster. He lifted his eyes to engage mine, and said, “Sometimes it rains.” One of the carpenters, a skinny cowboy type with a perpetual cigarette at the center of his mouth, overheard this and crinkled his forehead.

No checkers tonight. Dad was laying out his platoon diagram, a kind of spreadsheet, with all his guys, as he called them, listed. “When I can’t fill this out, I’ll know I have dementia,” he said. It was remarkable, a big thing on butcher paper, maybe twenty-five names, with their specialties and rankings designated — riflemen, machine gunners, radiomen, grenadiers, fire-team leaders, and so on. There was, characteristically, a star beside my father’s name, the CO. Some names were crossed out with Vietnam dates; some were annotated as natural-cause eliminations. It was all so orderly — even the deaths seemed orderly, once you saw them on this spreadsheet. I think this was how Dad dealt with mortality: when a former sergeant died of cirrhosis in his sixties, Dad crossed out his square on the spreadsheet with the same grim aplomb he’d used for the twenty-somethings in firefights; it was all war to him, from, as he said, “the erection to the Resurrection.”

Although he complained all the time, Dad lost weight on my regimen. When he got below the magic number, Mom didn’t believe my scale or my word, and we had to have him weighed at the fire station, with a fireman reading the number to her over the phone while Dad rounded up a couple of guys to show him the hook-and-ladder. He’d made it by a little over a pound.

When I came home from the plastic surgeon’s house that night, Dad was packing up. He had a glass of whiskey on the nightstand, and his little tape player was belting out a nostalgic playlist: Mott the Hoople, Dusty Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Quicksilver Messenger Service — his courting songs. My God, he was heading home to Mom again!

“Got it worked out?” I said, flipping through one of the girlie magazines he’d picked up in Helena, a special on “barely legals.”

“We’ll see.”

“Anything new?”

“Not at all. She’s the only one who understands me.”

“No one understands you.”

“Really? I think it’s you that nobody understands. Anyway, there are some preliminaries in this case that I can live with.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t go to the house. I have to stay at a hotel.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? A lot of surprising stuff happens at a hotel. For all intents and purposes, I’ll be home.”

And now I have to figure out how to work around Dee and Helen Folsom, who are on the job site continuously and kind of in the way. One night, they camped out on the subflooring of what will be their bedroom, when we barely had the sheathing on the roof. The crew had to shoo them away in the morning. I think the Folsoms were embarrassed, dragging the blow-up mattress out to their old sedan.

I have no real complaints about my upbringing. My parents were self-absorbed and never knew where I was, which meant that I was free, and I made good use of that freedom. I’ve been asked if I was damaged by my family life, and the answer is a qualified no; I know I’ll never marry, and, halfway through my life, I’m unable to imagine letting anyone new stay in my house for more than a night — and preferably not a whole night. Rolling over in the morning and finding … let’s not go there. I build houses for other people, and it works for me.

I like to be tired. In some ways, that’s the point of what I do. I don’t want to be thinking when I go to bed, or, if there is some residue from the day, I want it to drain out and precipitate me into nothingness. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. I view pets with extraordinary suspicion: we need to stay out of their lives. I saw a woman fish a little dog out of her purse once, and it bothered me for a year. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out.

When Monika and I were first married we rented a house on Sand Creek, sight unseen, because Monika wanted to live in the country, and nothing else was available within reach of town. Everything we had been told was true: the house was a furnished ranch house with two bedrooms, two baths, near a quiet grove of aspens. It had been repossessed from a cowboy and his wife, who had gone on to Nevada or Oregon — somewhere in the Great Basin. The man at the bank said that he was an old-time rambling buckaroo, who’d stopped making his mortgage payments because “he was looking for a quit.” Monika turned to me for an explanation, but I just wanted to get the deal done and move in. “It might not be exactly to your taste,” the banker said, “but nothing says you can’t tweak it.”

It was an absolute horror. Skinned coyote carcasses were piled on the front step, and a dead horse hung from its halter where it had been tied to the porch. Inside was a shambles, and there was one detail we couldn’t understand without the help of the neighbors: shotgun blasts through the bathroom door. Apparently Mrs. Old-Time Buckaroo used to chase Mr. Old-Time Buckaroo around the house until he ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and hid in the bath. The sides of the tub were pocked with lead.