Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

Monika, who had seen the dead horse, said that it was a shame the wife had failed and that the two of them were now in the Great Basin, living out their lives. This is a bit of an understatement — at the time Monika broke into sobs and begged to be taken away. “Is this how you treat your wife?” she turned on me. “Stop calling me your princess, you bastard.” I never quite got used to these flare-ups or to Monika’s sometimes-misleading passion for fresh starts.

Monika was not only not a westerner; she was not even an American. She had been stranded in architecture school by the uproar in the former Yugoslavia, and by the time it was safe for her to go home, we had met and planned to marry. Which we did. And now we were in that house. Monika was commuting to architecture school, and I was running an underemployed law office that five years earlier had done thirty real-estate closings a month and now did at most two and often none. Booms in real estate came and went, like weather, except that there always seemed to be plenty of weather.

I am aware that my ability to wittily point out things like this, and to describe the house the way I am describing it, has a lot to do with the fact that Monika left soon after we’d moved in. She abandoned what she contemptuously described as “the western lifestyle” to return to her parents in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, she found herself a nice house with no dead horses or coyotes, and a nice man and a nice baby — a twofer in the fresh-start business. Ours had been a poor excuse for a marriage, borne on an ill wind from the start.

I was still in the house, which we had painted in such a hurry that we’d rolled right over the outlets and floor moldings in uneven lines, giving one the feeling that the interior had somehow been draped in paint. For a long time, the sight of the walls kept Monika in my mind, even when womenfolk came for a visit, always short. Something — either me or the house — seemed to give them the willies.

I first met Bob when he came to congratulate me on “getting rid of that Croat.” Like many other men in the area, Bob wore cowboy boots and a big hat and described himself as a former cowboy. This phenomenon interested me, and I began to put the stories together a bit. For example, Bob, a retired electrician, had not been a cowboy for at least forty-five of his sixty-two years. Further investigation suggested that his cowboy years had occurred somewhere between the sixth and seventh grades and may have lasted just under a month. I had always imagined cowboys, former and otherwise, to be laconic men, who, if they overcame their reluctance to speak at all, did so without much expression. Not Bob. Bob never shut up and his facial movements had more in common with those of Soupy Sales than John Wayne. A surprising number of his anecdotes culminated in his telling people off, especially members of his own family. “My mother’s in her eighties and she keeps talking about when I was in her belly. Ever hear anything more disgusting? I finally had to tell her to shut her trap.” Or “I got fed up with my son. I told him to go fuck himself. He said he’d give it his best shot. Never at a loss for words, that boy.” Or “They’re all driving me crazy: my wife, my mother, my son, all his noisy friends. All the guys I worked with. Too much time on their hands. They need to get a life and quit cluttering up mine.”

Mail addressed to Bob was once mistakenly delivered to my box, so I took it up to his place. It was clear that he was living alone. In time, I learned that he had been living alone for years and that all his stories of telling people off were just wishful thinking. Bob’s relatives had put plenty of distance between themselves and him long ago. The only car that was ever in his driveway was his, an obsolete six-cylinder Bel Air with plenty of gravel cracks in the windshield. But at least Bob had integrity: he was mad at the world, if not yet at me. If I didn’t wind sprint to my car or work on weekends, I was in for long visits. Still, something about him touched me.

Bob and I had really started to settle in — with Bob tracking my movements to make sure that I was home from work for at least ten minutes before he showed up — when Monika called me from Belgrade. She had written occasionally since leaving, but this was the first time I had spoken to her in a couple of years. I found it painful in the extreme and didn’t quite keep track of the conversation, uncertain why I should care that she had money from the sale of her house or that little Karel already slept through the night and was such a happy boy. Monika must have detected my confusion because she suddenly asked, “Are you following this?” and I had to admit that I was a bit lost. She filled me in: she wanted to come back. What had happened to her new man? I asked her. “Out the window!” she said.

Monika spoke nearly perfect English, but she always managed to alter our colloquialisms slightly. My favorite was her description of a problem as “a real kink in the ointment.” I tried to correct this to “fly in the ointment,” but with a blank look on her beautiful face she asked me what a fly would be doing in ointment. I let it go. I had been raised to think that loving your spouse was a requirement. “Love is a job,” my mother had snarled at our wedding as she gazed at Monika, who was wearing some sort of shocking Eastern European headdress. Thus, I loved Monika even after she left me and until the day she announced her return, a baby under her arm by someone I had never met.

On the first day of the Bozeman Sweet Pea Festival, Monika got off the plane and handed me little Karel. “For you. Have I aged? I don’t seem to turn heads the way I used to.” She wore some sort of gown that fit her like a giant lampshade, a grand cone that went from her neck to the ground. “Is that a dirndl?” I asked.

“No, it’s a dashiki. Oh, God, you haven’t changed.”

I was in shock. As for little Karel, now in my arms, he was clearly black. I had an unworthy thought: Wait until Bob gets a load of this. Turned out I was wrong to worry about it because when Bob met Karel he thought he had a skin condition of some kind and expressed his sympathy.

In the parking lot, Monika said, “What are you doing with this tiny car?”

“I’ve been single, Monika. It was all I needed.”

“Well, I’m back.” She worked her way into the passenger seat while I held little Karel, who was gazing into my eyes confidently. “And this put-put will prove inadequate.”

The feeling came back to me, from the days of our marriage, that I was doomed in life to take a lot of shit and make weak jokes in response.

We made love as soon as we got to the house. Monika bounced me around and remarked that I seemed out of it. Across her lower back was a mysterious architectural tattoo, which turned out to be Le Corbusier’s plan for the High Court of Chandigarh, India. As I drifted off into postcoital tristesse, Monika raided the icebox. She was perfectly candid about her enthusiasm for food, explaining that her ex was a glutton. “Often when people come from lands of scarce resources their response to abundance is gluttony.”

“A big fellow, is he?” I asked weakly.

“In every way,” she said with a laugh. “You know what a Mandingo is?”

“Is it something to eat?”

“No, idiot! A Mandingo is an African warrior. You’re thinking of a mango!”

“Oh. Is he an African warrior?”

“Hardly. He’s a Nigerian neurosurgeon. But Olatunde has the sort of Mandingo traits that I hope Karel inherits. He’s actually Yoruba.”

I looked over at Karel. He didn’t seem to possess any Mandingo traits. He was just a little baby waving his arms around. When Monika collapsed with jet lag, I took him out to the sofa and let him play on my chest until he fell asleep. And then I fell asleep. The last thing I saw was a bird trying to get in the window. Monika’s luggage was still sitting in the living room, unopened.