Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

Tony said, “My dad was a butcher, and I’m a surgeon. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of jokes about that around town.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The funny thing is, I didn’t want to be a surgeon — I wanted to be a butcher. The old second-generation climb into some stratosphere where you’ll never be comfortable again. Where you never know where you live.”

“I don’t think you’d like it back there at the packing plant.”

“Not now — I’ve been spoiled. But if I’d stayed … I don’t know. Dad was always happy.”

“And you’re not?” Jack asked.

“Not particularly. Maybe after Gerri goes. Now that I’m used to the idea, the divorce, I can’t wait. I think I’m overspreading my discomfort around.”

“Jan and I don’t have the option,” Jack said. “There’s not enough for either one of us to start over on. We’re stuck together whether we like it or not.” He was thinking of how life and nature were just alike, but he couldn’t figure out how to put it into words.

Boulders, submerged beneath the water, could be felt as the boat rose and fell, and the river began to narrow toward a low canyon. In a tightening voice, Tony said, “Most of humanity lives beside rivers. By letting this one take us where it will, we’ll be delivered to some form of civilization. A settlement, at least.” He reached inside his coat and pulled out a wallet. “I thought we better bring this.”

“Is that Hewlitt’s wallet?”

“That’s not his name. There are several forms of identification, but none of them are for a Hewlitt.” He riffled it open to show Jack the driver’s licenses and ID cards, all with the same picture and all with different names.

“He had a lot of musical talent,” Jack said, and let out a crazy, mirthless laugh.

“See up there? I bet those are the rapids he was talking about.”

“Oh, goody. Nature.”

Indeed, where the canyon began, and even from this distance, the sheen of the river was surmounted by something sparkling, some effervescence, a vitality that had nothing to do with them. Shapes appeared under the boat, then vanished as the river’s depth changed, the banks and walls of trees narrowing toward them and the approaching canyon walls. You couldn’t look up without wanting to get out through the sky.

At the mouth of the canyon was a standing wave. Somehow the river ran under it, but the wave itself remained erect. A kind of light could be seen around it. Tony thought it had the quality of authority, like the checkpoint of a restricted area; Jack took it for yet another part of the blizzard of things that could never be explained and that pointlessly exhausted all human inquiry. Carrying these distinct views, their boat was swept into the wave, and under; and Jack and Tony were never seen again.

Glendive was unbearably hot in August, and for half of it I rented a cottage on the western shore of Flathead Lake, a little getaway in sight of Wild Horse Island and built a long time ago between two rocky points barely thirty yards apart, the lawn between them leading down to a pebbly shore and the deep green water in a kind of pool. The place was only available because the neighbor whose starter castle towered over the next small bay had died in the spring. A Kansas City resident who had made a fortune trading carbon credits and ringtones, he owned the kind of craft normally at the service of drug runners, a vastly powerful cigarette boat whose daily thunder made the nearby rental cottages uninhabitable. Pleas went unacknowledged, the petition thrown out as the smell of fuel continued to drift up from his dock. So after the boat owner died, concluding a prolonged battle with pancreatic cancer, Memorial Day in the small surrounding neighborhood was given over to celebration. The jubilant air persisted as FOR SALE signs appeared on his property, then through its deterioration, especially as islands of quack grass started pushing up through the clay tennis court. Suddenly the small cottages, each with its tiny green bay and an evergreen-crowned rocky ridge running to the lake, were all back in business. I felt very lucky to have scored one of them on short notice, a one-bedroom clapboard house with a mossy shingled roof and overstuffed chairs fished out of winter homes elsewhere, before the age of dedicated cottage furniture. The fireplace was made of round stones from the lakeside, and a huge incongruous print of Niagara Falls was the main room’s only decoration. “Were these people all short?” Adele asked, noticing that every lamp lit us at waist level unless we slumped into one of the low-slung chairs to thumb the swollen copy of Redbook . At night, above these lamps, all was darkness.

I was having an affair with Adele, a married woman whose availability was also made known to me at the last moment. We’d been doing this for nine years, nine short-term rentals, each begun just as her husband finalized his schedule, which included an annual visit to his mother in rural South Africa, where communications were conveniently, if uncertainly, faulty. Adele and I otherwise avoided deceit of any kind, operating on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis, each suspecting that ours was the kind of flourishing relationship that would wither in the full light of day. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but it fades passion like everything else. I’m a widower with grown children, but Adele’s were of an impressionable age, and God forbid they ever found out about us. They couldn’t possibly have understood. We relished this covert life and didn’t mind in the least that we could be deceiving ourselves, lost as we were in its pleasures and logistics.

Usually, we arrived in separate cars, but this time Adele came on the train from Seattle, where she’d gone for a design show. I picked her up at the station in Whitefish, observing our customary artifice—“You never know who you’ll run into in Montana”—before we took a look around from inside my car and began kissing. By now, there was no need for any foreshadowing in these early pecks: we knew what was coming. As I drove out and turned onto the highway for the lake, Adele said, “Seattle was wonderful, but then it’s summer. You smell salt water, and there are cranes and freighters and container ships like a real seaport. You don’t get that in San Francisco. And I met the coolest cowboy, a professional rodeo cowboy, and he could talk about anything. He was reading a book!” Adele looked great in a cotton summer dress, this one blue with tiny silver zigzags.

“And?” I asked.

“He was too big for a Pullman berth.”

I didn’t know if she was serious. I don’t think she was. It’s possible she had a wild side, but you wouldn’t know it by our relationship, which had almost nothing wild about it. Perhaps monogamous cheaters were commoner than I thought.

I loved Adele, and Adele loved me, but we were not in love, and she couldn’t make me jealous, though that principle was untested. I once pretended to be in love with her, and my saying so was greeted by silence arising from contempt. It was instructive. I barely made up for it by deferring ejaculation for about ninety minutes, which left me stooped for two days with lower back pain. I took some ibuprofen, and Adele read to me from Tartarin of Tarascon in recognition of my sacrifice. When we got to the part where Tartarin is unable to decide whether to cover himself with glory or with flannel, we closed the book and fell asleep with plenty of room between us on the bed, where we always left whatever we’d been reading and, lately, our reading glasses.