Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

Rudy, a low-risk mental patient, had just walked out of the Warm Springs hospital. The backpack contained pebbles, a dead bird, and a book on teaching yourself to dance. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky for a week in Rudy’s hometown on the Wyoming border. He could have walked there in half a day.

It had been too obvious that Rudy was harmless. The doctors at the Warm Springs hospital made such a huge point of it that the whole town was embarrassed. Dan Sheare at the Ford dealership said it was like they had shot the Easter Bunny, “Town Without Pity,” and so forth. So Sheriff Johnsrud conceded the terrible misfortune and took full responsibility. After all, he had fired the shot. But eventually Johnsrud changed, or everyone thought he had, though some admitted they would’ve changed, too, if such a thing happened to them, or else they concluded they were only imagining the sheriff was any different than he had always been. Eric, however, who had been born right there in town, moved away. Eventually people quit asking where Eric had got off to, just assuming he had landed on his feet somewhere. Probably his sister still heard from him. She lived over where the first post office burned down giving her a great view of the mountains.

When, sitting under the Dos Equis beer umbrella, Pat joked that Eric had left law enforcement, Juanita startled herself by spitting in his face. Things had started to go wrong for them, though it didn’t seem so at first and not really for a while afterward, because the Cancún trip had provided needed relief, especially for Juanita, who found she could still turn a few heads on the beach. “Oh God, we’re not really going back to Montana,” she said on the last day. Pat said, “I hate to think how much we’ll miss these warm sea breezes,” but that wasn’t what she meant at all, at all, at all.

During a pensive moment in the airport, while waiting to board, Pat said, “Tell me honestly, Juanita, why did you spit in my face?”

“I admit I thought about it.”

“Darling, you didn’t think about it, you did it. You spit in my face.”

“I did?”

Juanita found this very disturbing. She knew she’d thought about it but … really?

Winter went on well into April, and they both were working very hard, trying to become a “unit” again, but the word itself had lost its meaning. They had been one for so long they couldn’t comprehend why it had become so hard. They couldn’t understand what was happening to them in other ways, either. For example, Carol Hayes, the sheriff’s dispatcher, who worked at the courthouse down the hall from Juanita and was just about her best friend, right out of the blue told Juanita to her face that she was a bitch on wheels. Juanita was astonished.

“What can you possibly mean!”

“Isn’t it obvious, Juanita?”

Juanita shrank into the files and deeds of her musty corner and went off to lunch with her head down. She didn’t want to dignify Carol’s remark by asking further what it meant, and as a result it just hung over her like a cloud. She quit going to the window and staring in the direction of their house, almost visible beyond the poplars at the fairgrounds. Oddly, she became more efficient. The small annoyance she once felt at being confined to this room was gone. There was a kind of relief in feeling she belonged here, as though the fight had gone out of her. And what good had that been anyway? Now, when asked about her job, she said simply, “It’s a living.”

Pat’s situation had become more precarious. While rehabilitating an old priest after rotator cuff surgery, he had been a bit zealous, causing a new tear. It was quickly repaired, but the surgeon appeared at physical therapy and rebuked Pat, who would remember the vehemence, if not the words particularly, and the fact that the surgeon, still in his scrubs, wore the most beautiful pair of oxblood loafers, slippers almost, with the thinnest of soles. Pat was so friendly with the staff that he was ashamed to have been scolded in front of them like a dog or a child. They couldn’t look at him, either.

The exceptionally long winters — the drifted driveway, the circles of ice in the windows, the days that abruptly ended in afternoon — might have had something to do with it, but that same hard April they decided to put the place on the market. They made no secret of thinking it a case of good riddance and didn’t mind letting the neighbors and their former friends know it. They put up a FOR SALE BY OWNER out front and awaited results.

At the courthouse, Juanita held up their deed for Carol the dispatcher to see. “This will have a new name on it for the first time in ninety years. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Where do you think you’re headed?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Carol went back to her desk opposite the front stairs. There wasn’t any point in talking to Juanita anymore. Pat used to be so much fun, too. Now he was a regular sad sack; so maybe Juanita came by this new disposition honestly. The truth was, they didn’t know where they were headed, but since they had never before known liquidity, they were sure it would come with ideas they didn’t yet have, ideas resembling hopeful points on the map. This confidence came and went, and there was little to be gained by mentioning the dread that seemed to seep out of nowhere.

Someone pulled up into the driveway in a brown four-door. It was the same shade of brown as Pat’s grandfather’s shot-up Plymouth rip-rapping the irrigation dam upstream. They watched from the edges of the front window, careful not to seem eager. The driver’s door opened, and a pair of narrow legs in old farmer pants swung out, resting on the ground. The driver gingerly slid out and shut the door: a woman perhaps just entering old age and remarkably unkempt, the wild gray hair pinned off her forehead with a red plastic comb, her barn coat done about the waist with twine. Walking unsteadily, she stared hard toward the house; she did not have the look of a prospect.

Pat and Juanita opened the door before the woman could knock. She made no attempt at introducing herself. “Yes?” said Juanita, Pat at her side attempting, “How can we help you?”

“I’m not sure you can,” she said distantly, looking from one to the other, and then just stopped. She had green eyes. Later, when Pat and Juanita remarked on them to each other, it seemed to start a conversation that went nowhere.

“What brings you here?” Pat asked like some sort of radio announcer too hearty for this small stalemate.

“A glass of cold water out of that spring behind the house.”

“Why, most certainly! You know, it’s piped right to the faucet. So why don’t you come in. I’ll bet you’re thirsty.”

“For some of that spring water.”

“You shall have it!” said Pat in that same hale voice, causing Juanita to glance quickly at him.

“How did you know about the spring?” Juanita chirped.

“I was told about it.”

They sat the woman down at the kitchen table made of cottonwood planks from the old stall barn. Pat had fitted the planks together with perfect joints when they were first married. This encumbrance they also intended to leave behind, because, as Juanita said, “It weighs a ton.” Pat felt they could have taken it but didn’t want to argue.

Juanita went to the sink and filled her tallest glass, and as she started to turn toward the refrigerator, the woman said, “No ice,” so Juanita turned back and set the glass of water before her. The woman nodded thanks. Pat sat at the far end tilting back his chair, hands behind his head in a pantomime of nonchalance.

The woman drained the glass and held it to eye level as though to look through it. Staring thus, she said, “I’m Rudy’s mother, the dead boy.”