Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

“Uh, Grandma, excuse me, but I have to see a man about a horse.” I jogged along the riverbank until I was well out of earshot, and lighting a cigarette, I called the sheriff’s office on my cell. I let the dispatcher know who I was and asked if the sheriff or one of the deputies was available. “I’ll check. What’s the topic?” The dispatcher’s tone let me know how they felt about me at the sheriff’s office.

“I’m down on the river, and a corpse just went by. Across from the dump. It’s going to pass under the Harlowton Bridge in about ten minutes.”

“There’s no one here right now. Marvin has a speeder pulled over at the prairie dog town. Maybe he could get there.”

“Next stop after that is Greycliff. Somebody’d have to sit on the bridge all day.”

“Please don’t raise your voice. Any distinguishing features?”

“How’s ‘dead’ sound to you?”

I went back to find Grandma lifting her face in the direction of the sun and seeming contented. A few cottonwood leaves fluttering in a breath of wind onto the surface of the river revealed the speed of the current. Every so often people floated by on rafts, blue rafts, yellow rafts, their laughter and conversations carried along on the water like a big, happy wake following a corpse.

“Are you ready to eat?” I asked.

“In a bit, unless you’re hungry now. It smells different than when we were here in August. I think something happens when the leaves begin to turn, something cidery in the air, and yesterday’s rain stays in the trunks of these old trees.” It had rained for about two minutes yesterday. Grandma’s got all these sensations dialed in as though she’s cramming the entire earth before she croaks.

I walked down to the river, took off my shoes and socks, and rolled up my pant legs. I waded in no more than a few inches when I heard my phone ring. I turned just in time to see Grandma groping for it next to where I left the box lunches. Oh, well. I kept wading and noticed three white pelicans standing among the car bodies on the far side of the river. I’d have thought they’d have gone south by now. I dug a few flat stones off the bottom and skipped them toward the middle of the river. I got five skips from a piece of bottle glass before going back to Grandma.

“That was the sheriff’s office.”

“Oh?”

“They wanted you to know that it was a jilted groom who jumped into Yankee Jim Canyon on Sunday. What day is today?”

“Wednesday.” Must have averaged a couple miles an hour.

“Why would they think you’d care about a jilted groom jumping into Yankee Jim Canyon?”

“Idle curiosity,” I said sharply.

“And the sheriff was calling just to fill you in? I don’t understand one bit of that, not one bit.”

I wasn’t about to let Grandma force me to ruin her outing by telling her what I had seen. So I opened the box lunch, spread a napkin on her lap, and there I set her sandwich, sliced cucumbers, and almond cookie. She lifted half of the sandwich.

“What is this? Smells like deviled ham.”

“It is deviled ham.”

“Starving.”

Must have been: she fucking gobbled it.

“I see where you had another DUI.”

You didn’t see that, you heard it, and I could reliably assume that Mrs. Devlin made sure of it. “Yes. Grandma, drunk at the wheel.” Of course I was making light of this, but secretly I thanked God it had stayed out of the papers. When you work with young children, it takes very little to tip parents into paranoia — they are already racked with guilt over dropping their darlings off with strangers in a setting where the little tykes could easily get shot or groped.

In families like mine, grandmothers loom large as yetis. I always thought having Grandma had been a blessing for me, but still I have often wondered if it wasn’t her vigor that had made my father into such a depressed boob. He was a case of arrested development who never made a dime, but Grandma supported him in fine-enough style for around here and at the far end of her apron strings. He was devoted to his aquarelles — his word. The basement was full of them. His little house has remained empty, except for the flowers, bunnies, puppies, and sunsets on every wall. Grandma says it’s without a doubt a meth lab.

Perhaps I felt some of his oppression as Grandma sat bolt upright holding that half a sandwich (“I trust you washed up before handling my food”) and inhaling the mighty cottonwoods, the watercress in the tiny spring seeping into the broad green and sparkling river. I thought about the drowned bridegroom sailing by, his arms fluttering like a bat. It was Grandma who’d taught me that every river has its own smell and that ours are fragrant while others stink to high heaven, catch fire, or plunge into desert holes never to be seen again.

I think that at bottom some of these reflections must have been prompted by the mention of my latest DUI, which was a frightful memory. I knew it wasn’t funny. I had left the Mad Hatter at closing, perfectly well aware that I was drunk. That was why I went there, after all. From the window at the back of the bar, as the staff cleaned up, I watched the squad car circle the block until I had determined the coast was clear. I ran through the cold night air to my car and headed up the valley. I hadn’t gone far when I saw the whirling red light in my rearview mirror, and there’s where I made a bad decision. I pulled over and bolted out of the car and ran into a pasture, tearing my shirt and pants on a barbed-wire fence. I didn’t stop running until I fell into some kind of crack in the ground and broke my arm. That light in my rearview turned out to be an ambulance headed farther up the valley. I crawled out of the crack and got back into the car to drive to the emergency room back in town. I soon attracted an actual policeman and hence the DUI, the cast on my arm, and this latest annoyance from Grandma, who may in fact be the source of my problems. I knew that thought was a tough sell which defied common sense, but it was gathering plausibility for me.

I looked across the river at the row of houses above the line of car bodies. I heard a lawn mower over the whisper of river. A tennis ball came sailing over the bank, a black dog watching as it disappeared into the river.

Grandma said, “When you were a little boy, I thought you would be president of the United States.” I got that odd shriveling feeling I used to get when our parents couldn’t handle us and she would have to come to our house. I decided to give her the silent treatment. She didn’t notice. I watched as she took in all she could smell and hear with the same upright posture and air of satisfaction. I unexpectedly decided that I was entitled to a little liquid cheer and began tiptoeing in the direction of my car a good distance away, wasted tiptoeing, I might add, as Grandmother said, “Bye-bye.”

I have no idea why starting the car and putting it in gear gave me such a gust of exhilaration that the quick stop for a couple of stiff ones seemed almost redundant. But that’s what happened, and I felt all the better for it as I walked into the sheriff’s office just as Deputy Crane was leaving. I caught his sleeve and asked about the corpse. I could tell by his expression that he could smell the adult beverage on my breath. “They pulled it out of the water at the Reed Point Bridge. I’m headed there now.”

“Oh, let me ride along.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

Deputy Crane would have to get up earlier in the morning if he wanted to be rid of me. By the time he pulled out of town, I was hot on his trail. The interstate followed the river, and we sped along doing seventy-five, the river intermittently visible on my left. Thus far the bridegroom had outrun us.