Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

Some sharp, if not violent, sounds could be heard from outside. Tony crawled forward in his shorts, carefully parting the entry to the tent to look out. Jack considered his friend’s taut physique and tried to remember how long he’d had his own potbelly. Tony was always in shape — part handball, part just being a surgeon.

“What’s he doing, Ton’?”

“Looks like he’s chopping firewood. I can barely see him in the dark. Not much of the fire left, now.”

“What was that stuff he made for dinner?”

“God only knows.”

The tent smelled like camphor, mothballs; the scent was pretty strong. When Jack let his hand rest outside his sleeping bag, the grass still felt wet. It made him want to take a leak, but he didn’t care to leave the tent as long as Hewlitt was out there.

Tony went back to his sleeping bag. It was quiet. A moment later his face lit up with blue light.

“You get a signal?”

“Are you kidding?” said Tony. “That would only inspire hope.”

Tony’s wife — Jack’s sister — was divorcing him. There were no kids, and Tony said the whole thing was a relief, said that he was not bitter. Jack was quite sure Tony was bitter; it was Jack’s sister who was not bitter. Jack had seen Gerri at the IGA, and she’d been decidedly unbitter — cheerful if not manic. She’d hoped they would have an “outtasight” trip. This was part of Gerri’s routine, hip and lively for a tank town. Tony might have been a bit serious for her, in the end. Maybe he needed to lighten up. Jack certainly thought so.

Jack’s wife, Jan, was one of the sad stories: having starred, in her small world, as a staggeringly hot eighteen-year-old when Jack, half cowboy and half high-school wide receiver, had swept her out of circulation, she had since gone into a rapid glide toward what could be identified at a thousand yards as a frump, and at close range as an angry frump. Gerri and Jan had driven “the boys” to the airport for their adventure together, each dreading the ride home, when in the absence of their men they would discover how little they had to talk about. In any case, they could hardly have suspected that they would never see their husbands again.

But the divorce wasn’t the reason that Tony was so bent on a trip. He’d made some sort of mistake in surgery, professionally not a big deal — no one had even noticed — but Tony couldn’t get it out of his mind. He’d talked about it in vague terms to Jack, the loss of concentration, and had reached this strange conclusion: “Why should I think I’ll get it back?”

“You will, Ton’. It’s who you are.”

“Oh, really? I have never before lost concentration with the knife in my hand. Fucking never.”

“Tony, if you can’t do your work in the face of self-doubt, you may as well just quit now.”

“Jack, you think you’ve ever experienced the kind of pressure that’s my daily diet?”

Jack felt this but let it go.

Marvin Eldorado Hewlitt was now their problem. Jack had tried plenty of other guides, but they were all either booked or at a sportsmen’s show in Oakland. He’d talked to some dandies after that, including a safari outfitter booking giraffe hunts. At the bottom of the barrel was Hewlitt, and now it was getting clearer why. So many of the things they would have thought to be either essential or irrelevant were subject to extra charges: fuel for the motor, a few vegetables, bear spray, trip insurance, lures, the gluten-free sandwich bread.

“But Marvin, we brought lures.”

“You brought the wrong lures.”

“I’ll fish with my own lures.”

“Not in my boat.”

Lures: $52.50. Those would be the dolls’ eyes.

“Marvin, I don’t think we want trip insurance. I’m just glancing at these papers — well, are you really also an insurance agent?”

“Who else is gonna do it? I require trip insurance. I’m not God, but acts of God produce client whining I can’t deal with.”

Trip insurance: $384.75.

“Tony, give it up. There’s no signal.”

Tony looked up. “Was that a wolf?”

“I don’t think it was a wolf. I think it was that crazy bastard.”

The howl came again, followed by Marvin’s chuckle.

“You see?”

Tony got out of his sleeping bag and peered through the tent flap.

“He’s still up. Sitting by the fire. He’s boiling something in some kind of a big cauldron. And he’s talking to himself, it looks like. Or it’s more like he’s talking to someone else, but there’s no one there that I can see. We’re in the hands of a lunatic, Jack.”

“Nowhere to go but up.”

“You could say that. You could pitch that as reasonable commentary.”

Jack felt heat come to his face. “Tony?”

“What?”

“Kiss my ass.”

“Ah, consistency. How many times have I prayed for you to smarten up?”

Jack thought, I’ve got him by forty pounds. That’s got to count.

The two fell silent. They were reviewing their relationship. So far, Tony had come up only with “loser,” based on Jack’s modest income; Jack had settled for “prick,” which he based on the entitlement he thought all doctors felt in their interactions with others. This standoff was a long time coming, a childhood friendship that had hardened. Probably neither of them wanted it like this; the trip was supposed to be an attempt to recapture an earlier stage, when they were just friends, just boys. But the harm had been done. Maybe they had absorbed the town’s view of success and let it spoil something. Or maybe it was the other thing again.

Outside, by the fire, Marvin was singing in a pleasant tenor. There was some accompaniment. Jack said, “See if he’s got an instrument.” Tony sighed and climbed out from his sleeping bag again. At the tent flap, he said, “It’s a mandolin.” And in fact at that moment a lyrical solo filled the air. Tony returned to his bag, and the two lay quietly, absorbing first some embellishment of the song Marvin had been singing and then a long venture into musical space.

Shortly after the music stopped, Marvin’s voice came through the tent flap.

“Boys, that’s all I can do for you. Now let’s be nice to one another. We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us.”

In a matter of minutes, the camp was silent. Stars rose high over the tents and their sleepers.

Morning arrived as a stab of light through the tent flap and the abrupt smell of trampled grass and mothballs. A round, pink face poked through at them, eyes twinkling unpleasantly, and shouted, “Rise and shine!”

“Is that you, Marvin?” Tony asked, groggily.

“Last time I looked.”

“What happened to the beard?”

“Shaved it off and threw it in the fire. When you go through the pearly gates, you want to be clean-shaven. Everybody else up there has a beard.”

The flap closed, and Jack said, “I smelled it. Burning.” Then he pulled himself up.

Jack fished his clothes out of the pile he’d made in the middle of the tent. Tony glanced at this activity and shook his head; his own clothes were hung carefully on a tent peg. He wore his unlaced hiking shoes as he dressed. Jack was briefly missing a shoe, but it turned up under his sleeping bag, explaining some of the previous night’s discomfort.

Tony said, “It’s time for us to face this lunatic if we want breakfast.”

The sunrise made a circle of light in the camp, piled high with pine needles next to the whispering river. Hewlitt had hoisted the perishable supplies up a tree to keep them away from bears; a folding table covered by a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth was set up by the small, sparkling fire. Stones on either side of the fire supported a blackened grill, from which Hewlitt brought forth a steady stream of ham, eggs, and flapjacks.