Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

The cloud passed overhead to the south and the Missouri River valley. The wind died, as the remaining snow was sifted onto the ice slowly unveiling a blue sky. Some forty feet away Ethan was clear as day in his red snowsuit. He was sitting crossed-legged next to the open water. “Daddy! Let’s fish here!” As they crossed the ice toward the car, John saw his son look back toward the black line of water, and he knew he was troubled.

Linda met them at the door. Lucius was out. Ethan jumped into her arms, and John handed her the bundled snowsuit. “Mom, we had so much fun! We caught a fish and went sliding, with Daddy trying to catch me!” But looking back at his father in confusion, he seemed about to cry.

Linda asked, “Where was this?”

“Over toward Helena.”

“A pond?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, well, never mind. It sounds like a great place.”

“I’ll take you sometime.”

Linda smiled, looked into his eyes, and gently rapped his chest with her knuckles. “Time to move on, Johnny, you know?”

John glanced away, pretending to look for Ethan. “Where’d he go?”

Hoagy Brown, the TV host, had lost interest in his memoirs. He let John see the sex and fart bloopers that could not be broadcast; but after the sufferings of his deprived childhood had been recounted in full, he found he hardly cared about revisiting his later life, his several wives or his son, a La Jolla Realtor. To John he seemed tired of living, having used up all the Schadenfreude that had propelled an illustrious career. He still had a dirty mind, though that too was fading, or perhaps he noticed John’s lack of enthusiasm for his tales of conquest among women, most of whom were, even by Hoagy’s account, dead anyway.

John didn’t expect to be paid now that he was leaving the project, and Hoagy never offered it. Instead, he followed John to his car and said, “You’re brushing me off, aren’t you?”

“Not in the least, Hoagy, but I don’t think at this late stage I have much to offer you.”

“What late stage? I’m just getting started.”

By then it was his time to have Ethan with him again, and he was excited about his plan for a hot-air-balloon ride, arranged and paid for at a popular “balloon ranch” in the foothills south of town. He paused before knocking on the door, a great oaken thing with a letter slot. On last year’s Christmas card it had been adorned with a splendid wreath, in front of which Linda and Lucius beamed, with Ethan in the foreground between them in a little blazer and bow tie. John had felt some incomprehension at the assertive formality of this scene and wondered what it was about the heavy front door that even now made him feel affronted.

He knocked, and Lucius answered. “Oh, John, what a pleasure. Let me get Ethan. Ethan! It’s Dad, get your things!”

Lucius ducked out of the doorway with a small, self-effacing bob that nevertheless left John waiting on the step looking into the hall. There he remained for a long time, his impulse to shut the door against the draft suppressed at the thought of again facing the letter slot and the expanse of varnished wood.

At length Lucius reappeared, wearing a frown of concern. He faced John silently in his cardigan, one arm clasped across his waist, the other holding his chin in deep thought. “I gather, John, that last week’s experience at Canyon Ferry was pretty darn frightening for Ethan. Is that how you understand it, Linda?”

Linda answered from someplace inside. “It is.”

“Linda’s trying to watch Mary Tyler Moore ,” Lucius explained. “Some classic episode.”

“And, what, Linda?” John called to her.

“And he doesn’t want to go with you,” came Linda’s voice in reply. “Do you mind? Why prolong this?”

“May I speak to Ethan?”

“If that’s what you require. Ethan, come speak to your father!”

Lucius seemed to be twisting with discomfort. He looked straight overhead and called out, “Please, Ethan, right now.”

Linda said, “Sorry about not coming to the door, John, but I’m not decent.”

Ethan appeared in flannel pajamas, a bathrobe, and rabbit slippers, head hung and glancing offstage in the direction of his mother. Lucius rested a hand on his head. John said in a voice of ghastly jocularity “What d’you say, Ethan? Aren’t we going to have our day together? I’ve planned something you’ll really like.”

Ethan said, “I don’t want to go with you.”

John was amazed at his directness.

John got interviews at several papers. His record was good, and the owners all apologized for the pay. Three of the seven made the same remark: “It’s a living.” And so without great conviction, John found himself in charge of the news in Palmyra, North Dakota, which served an area identical in size to the principality of Liechtenstein, or so the Herald ’s owner liked to say. Over the course of many years, John learned all there was to know about Palmyra, and almost nothing of the place he’d left, except that Linda had died, that Ethan had finished college and lived in Fresno, at least according to the last update he’d received quite some time ago. John assumed he was still around there somewhere — Ethan, that is. Lucifer could be anywhere.

“Anytime you’re on the Aleguketuk, you might as well be in heaven. I may never get to heaven, so the Aleguketuk will have to do — that, and plenty of beer! Beer and the river, fellows: that’s just me.

“Practical matters: chow at first light. If you ain’t in the chow line by 0-dark-thirty, your next shot is a cold sandwich on the riverbank. And don’t worry about what we’re going to do; you’ll be at your best if you leave your ideas at home.

“Now, a word or two about innovation and technique. You can look at these tomorrow in better light, but they started out life as common, ordinary craft-shop dolls’ eyes. I’ve tumbled them in a color solution, along with a few scent promulgators distilled from several sources. You will be issued six of these impregnated dolls’ eyes, and any you don’t lose in the course of action will be returned to me upon your departure. I don’t want these in circulation, plain and simple.

“The pup tent upwind of the toilet pit is for anyone who snores. That you will have to work out for yourselves. I remove my hearing aid at exactly nine o’clock, so snoring means no more to me than special requests. From nine until daybreak, a greenhorn can be seen but not heard.

“Lastly, the beautiful nudes featured on the out-of-date welding-supplies calendar in the cook tent are photographs of my bride at twenty-two. Therefore that is a 1986 calendar and will not serve for trip planning.”

Marvin “Eldorado” Hewlitt backed his huge bulk out of the tent flap, making a sight gag of withdrawing his long gray beard from the slit as he closed it. Sitting on top of their sleeping bags, the surgeon Tony Capoletto and his brother-in-law Jack Spear turned to look at each other. Tony said, “My God. How many days do we have this guy? And why the six-shooter?”

Tony, the more dapper of the two, wore a kind of angler’s ensemble: a multipocketed shirt with tiny brass rings from which to suspend fishing implements, quick-dry khaki pants that he’d turned into shorts by unzipping them at the knee, and wraparound shades that dangled from a Croakie at his chest. His pale, sharp-featured face and neatly combed hair were somewhat at odds with this costume.

“I have no idea,” Jack said. His own flannel shirt hung loose over his baggy jeans. “He seemed so reasonable on the Internet.”