Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

Pat pulled his chair upright and set his hands close to him on the table. Juanita grinned with pain. “I’m so sorry.”

Pat said, “We’re both so sorry.”

“Oh?”

After a long silence, Juanita asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

“Sure,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of her coat and lighting it with a beat-up old Zippo. Pat and Juanita refrained from mentioning how much they hated smoking. The woman held the cigarette between her second and third fingers, as if in the middle of her hand. “You can tell me about his last day here.”

“I can do that,” said Juanita, getting braver. “He — Rudy — really just turned up and immediately started talking about his life like I had known him before.”

“You had known him before?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay.”

“Oh yes, and then, uh, we were just chatting in general, well, really it was quite brief, and he told me he—”

“He gave you some reason to call the law?”

“Well, ma’am, I have to be honest, he kind of frightened me the way he, the way he was talking.” Juanita was startled to hear her own voice rise so quickly.

The woman took the cigarette from her mouth but kept it in her hand in front of her face. “That wasn’t no lie. Rudy was a shaman.”

“We don’t even know what that is!” cried Pat.

The woman got up and dropped the cigarette hissing into the nearly empty water glass. “I just feel like you made a big mistake, but I guess time will tell if it hasn’t already.”

At the door they assured her they felt just as bad as she did. She shook her head slightly; she seemed to wonder at them. “I wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I’d of had more sense.”

They watched her go to her car. They expected her to say something or glance back, but no. In the house, when Juanita said she had eyes like a cat, Pat didn’t seem to pick up on it, remarking instead that she must have been a great beauty in her day. He left the room, and Juanita emptied the cigarette butt into the sink before going to the window. The car was already gone.

John’s wife hadn’t remarried, but she was in a stable relationship with a reliable man, while John, laid off from the newspaper a year by then, was living alone in a way to suggest he always would — all of which made visitations a study in contrasts for their son, Ethan. John could have found another newspaper job — downsizing had only marginally trumped his proficiency — but it would have meant moving away, in preference to which he stayed in town and taught welding, his former hobby, to non-traditional students at the college. And two days a week, he met with the former host of a TV “blooper” show, helping him write his memoirs, an entirely lugubrious tale of imagined suffering. The ex-host was determined for posterity to know that belying those forty years of guffawing at the pratfalls of others, he had known real anguish and been misunderstood from the day he was born in the back of a taxi, his first recollection the foldout ashtray on the back of the driver’s seat.

It might have seemed that Linda and her Lucifer — actually his name was Lucius, only John called him that — would supply at least a semblance of family life, while John the bachelor, led by his tuning fork into the hungry thickets of the town, would struggle to make time for Ethan. In actuality, Linda and Lucius found their bliss as two purposeful suits, both on the way up. It made John feel that his marriage of almost ten years had served as Linda’s think tank for an eventual assault on the future, an unkind and somewhat unwarranted version of facts, because she’d always said she wanted to work. She was pretty, and her life with John was meager, while Lucius was a rising star in banking, land, cattle, natural gas, and hydropower. John would learn only long after it mattered that the two had been exhausting their erotic urgency over four vigorous years of infidelity prior to the separation, which left John struggling to catch up in one sad purlieu after another, and feeling as a father nihilistic and unworthy. The three women he bedded during the proceedings were impossible to avoid, and when he ran into them, whether at the post office, the bank, or the Safeway, he just apologized. But each of these was a single unmarried woman and John was attractive, so they hardly knew how to take his contrition. If John had learned anything, it was that, once the threshold of venery was crossed, and all the furies unleashed, the aisles of the Safeway were no longer safe. A baffled if indignant former paramour in Cereals could loom with ominous incomprehension.

For the regular handoff, John appeared at Linda’s new house with its wonderful view of the snowy massif of the Bridger ridge. The moment was rarely less than painful despite that it had gone on for more than a year. This time, Ethan was already dressed in a red snowsuit and an insulated hat slightly too big for him. Linda hugged herself against the cold. It was easier all around to meet her ex-husband on the front step than have him come inside. Ethan’s arms hung at his sides, and he glanced at his mother several times; she responded by resting a hand on his head. Ethan peered out from beneath that shelter while John stared at Linda with hopeless longing.

“I’ll have him back by supper.” He didn’t want to say he’d have him “home” by supper but should have known that the struggle with that terminology was long lost.

“Perfect. You guys will have fun. Right, Ethan?” Ethan nodded grimly. His mother laughed at his posturing. “He’ll be fine once you get going.” Reflexively she touched her lips with her forefinger, which she then touched to Ethan’s, then to John’s.

John led Ethan by the hand to the car. He turned to give Linda a wave, but she was already gone behind the door. It was too cold for ceremonial lingering, though Ethan, too, stared at the door before getting into John’s car with a boost.

“Do you want to take off your snowsuit?”

“No.”

“Do you want to unzip it?”

“No. I want to listen to the radio.”

“Can we just talk a little bit?”

“Okay.”

It was quiet before John, his voice thick with emotion, spoke. “Do you like doing stuff with me?”

“It’s okay.”

“Because today we’re going fishing.”

Ethan looked startled and scrutinized his father with interest. He said, “But everything is frozen.” They were following a Brink’s truck changing lanes without signaling.

“We’re going ice fishing. You drill a hole in the ice and drop your line through.”

“Are there fish under there?”

“We’re going to find out.”

Canyon Ferry Lake, an impoundment of the Missouri River, spread before them as a vast sheet of ice that ended at a seam of open water, perhaps the old river. John parked across the ice from Confederate Gulch at the “silos,” the tall brick towers for storing grain. The Big Belt Mountains rose against a blue sky marbled with cirrus clouds streaming toward them from the Gate of the Mountains. Ethan, suddenly excited, ran around the car helping John with their gear. An iron spud for making a hole in the ice stuck out of the trunk. Ethan tried to carry it, but it was too heavy. John had spent a bewildering hour at Sportsman’s Warehouse and come away with only the minimal kit but all that he could understand. He could have spent a fortune on a gas-powered ice auger, heated shelter, and underwater cameras attached to TV monitors, which, said the salesman, would set him up “good as the next guy.” But John settled for a box of assorted hooks and jigs, the spud, and a skimmer to clear slush from the hole.