Thomas McGuane: Crow Fair: Stories

Instead, I called the police in town. Monika called Olatunde in Yugoslavia and put me on the phone. “You tell him.”

“Good morning, Doctor. It’s afternoon there already? Well, I have news, well, not news exactly. One of our neighbors here has … kidnapped Karel.” Dr. Olatunde was understandably slow in absorbing this announcement but not in any other way, and it fell to me to pick him up at the airport a day and a half later.

These were terrible hours. Monika stayed home as we awaited word from the police, her drawings laid out on the kitchen table. She showered me with reproaches, the recurrent one being that Karel would never have “slipped through her hand” if I hadn’t chased the babysitter away with my ogling. Pointing at the drawings, I said, “I see the loggia stays.”

“Yes, and a pergola.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

I met Dr. Olatunde at the baggage claim though he had only a carry-on. He was the sole African among all the skiers, and he drew a bit of attention to himself for that and for the suit he wore, a nice English cut, rumpled from the long trip. He was not at all the big Mandingo glutton I had pictured but a small, precise man with a slightly receding hairline and a friendly but crisp manner. He said, “You were kind to come for me.”

“You must be tired.”

“Not so bad, really.”

“Well, I have marvelous news for you. Karel has been found.”

“Is that so?”

“I hope you don’t feel the trip was wasted.”

“Nothing could compare to this. Is he well?”

Bob and Karel had not gone far, at least not far enough to give plausibility to a charge of kidnapping. They were in the first motel on the way into town. Their loud music had given them away. Bob was belligerent about what he described as the hostile atmosphere of our home, and we felt that by pressing charges we would only bring his version into the public eye. Karel responded to his father, whom he could hardly have been expected to remember, much as he responded to Bob: he was always drawn to someone who looked straight at him as though making a delightful discovery. I spell this out because it was against all odds that we allowed Bob to come back again and let ourselves be compensated by Karel’s squeals of delight. More and more, he stays over at Bob’s anyway, which Monika and I hope will give us some room to work things out.

My grandmother lost her sight about three years ago, just before she turned ninety, and because it happened gradually, and in the context of so much other debility, she adapted very well. Grandma’s love of the outdoors combined with her remarkable lucidity and optimism to keep her cheerful and realistic. And she could get on my ass about as good as she ever could. She was now greatly invested in her sense of smell, so I tried to put fresh flowers around her house, while Mrs. Devlin, her housekeeper of forty-one years, kept other things in the cottage fresh, including the flow of gossip and the newspaper under Chickie, a thirty-year-old blue-fronted parrot that had bitten me several times. When Grandma goes, Chickie is going into the disposal.

Grandma did a remarkable job of living in the present, something I’d hoped to learn from her before going broke or even crazier than I already was. I’d been away for over a decade, first as a timekeeper in a palladium mine, then dealing cards, downhill all the way. Three years in a casino left me so fucked up I was speaking in tongues, but Grandma got me back on my feet with pearls of immortal wisdom like “Pull yourself together.” And while I waited for her to give me a little walking-around money, a pearl or two would come to me, too, like “Shit or get off the pot.”

Grandma owned several buildings in the middle of our small town, including the old hotel where I lived. I looked after them, not exactly as a maintenance man — I don’t have such trade skills — but more as an overseer, for which Grandma paid me meagerly, justifying her stinginess with the claim that I was bleeding her white. Another building housed an office-supply shop and a preschool, where I was a teaching assistant. That is, a glorified hall monitor for a bunch of dwarfs. I also tended bar two nights a week — the off nights, when tips were scarce, but it was something to do and kept me near the hooch. Grandma had bought the bar, too, back when it was frequented mainly by sheepherders. Sheep have mostly disappeared from the area since being excluded from the national forest, which they had defoliated better than Agent Orange. I didn’t see much point in tending an empty bar, but Grandma required it. It was part of my “package,” she said, and besides she was sure that if we closed it down, it would become a meth lab. Grandma was convinced every empty building housed a meth lab.

The preschool thing was another matter. Mrs. Hessler, the teacher, considered me her employee, and I played along with this to keep the frown off that somewhat-shapeless face she had crowned with an inappropriate platinum pixie. I regularly fed her made-up news items from imaginary newspapers, and she always bought it.

“Drone Strike on a Strip Club,” for example. In return, Mrs. Hessler made me wear clothes she supplied and considered kid friendly; loud leisure suits and sweatpants, odd-lot items that gave me the feeling I was at the end of my rope.

Barring weather or a World Series game, on Sundays I’d pick up a nice little box lunch from Mustang Catering and take Grandma someplace that smelled good. I was often in rough shape on Sunday mornings, so a little fresh air helped me dry out in time for work on Monday. We’d have our picnics in fields of sage and lupine, on buffalo-grass savannas north of town, on deep beds of spruce needles, and in fields of spring wildflowers. I’d have enough of nature pretty quick, but we stayed until Grandma had had her fill; she told me it was the least I could do, and I suppose she’s right.

Today’s nature jaunt turned out to be one for the ages: we went to a bend in the river near Grandma’s and set up our picnic under the oldest of cottonwoods, so that the eastbound current raced toward us over pale gravel. It smelled wonderful. Once out of the car, I led Grandma with a light touch on the elbow, marveling at how straight and tall she was — how queenly she looked with her thick white hair carefully piled and secured by Mrs. Devlin with a broad tortoiseshell comb. I had just settled Grandma on her folding chair and popped open our box lunch when the corpse floated by. Though facedown, he seemed formally attired, and the tumult of current at the bend was strong enough to make him ripple from end to end, while his arms seemed lofted in some oddly valedictory way, and his hair floated ahead of him. The sunlight sparkling on the water made the picture ghastly.

“Oh!” said Grandma as though she could see it.

“What?”

“That divine smell, of course! I can still smell snow in the river!”

The corpse had rotated in such a way that I could now see the heels of its shoes and the slight ballooning of its suit coat. Just then I remembered that cheap Allegiant flight I’d taken back from Las Vegas. I’d lost so much money, I got drunk on the plane and passed out, and someone scrawled LOSER on my face in eyebrow pencil, though I didn’t see it until the men’s room at the Helena airport. Was I so far gone I was identifying with a corpse?

“What an awful child you were,” Grandma said. “Already drinking in the sixth grade. What would have become of you if I hadn’t put you in Catholic school? It was your salvation and thank goodness the voodoo wore off in time. It wasn’t easy humoring those silly nuns. They never took their hands out of their sleeves the whole time you were there.”