Thomas McGuane: Crow Fair: Stories

I picked up my father on a sultry morning with heavy, rumbling clouds on the horizon. My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight. She’d said that he was insufficiently committed to his weight-loss journey and that if he hit two-fifty she wouldn’t live with him anymore. She seemed to know he’d be heading my way: I had been getting obesity-cure solicitations over the phone, my number doubtless supplied by her. I was tired of explaining to strangers that I wasn’t fat and of being told that a lot of fat people don’t realize how fat they are or wrongly assume that they can do something about it on their own, without paying.

By the time my father got to me, he was well over Mom’s limit, and he wanted to go somewhere to eat as soon as he got off the plane. He was wearing a suit, rumpled from his travels, but his tie was in place: a protest against the rural surroundings. I took him on a little tour of the town — the rodeo grounds, the soccer field by the river, the old-car museum. He was happiest at the railroad shops, the smell of grease rising from a huge disabled locomotive, mechanics around it like Pygmies around an elephant. “When’s she go back to work?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. The mechanics didn’t look at him; they looked at one another. My father was undismayed: they assumed he was management, he said.

At the diner, he asked if the chicken sandwich on the menu was actually made of chicken or was “some conglomerate.” A blank stare from the waitress. He ordered the sandwich. “I’ll just have to find out myself.” He insisted on buying our lunch, but when the cashier counted the change too rapidly for his taste he pushed it all back toward her and said, “Start over.”

A man in a suit was an uncommon sight around here, and the responses to him indicated bafflement. In the afternoon, I rowed him down the river, still in the suit. He brought along some pie from the restaurant and asked me not to hit it with the oars; he held both hands over the pie as though to protect it.

I made dinner at my house, a place he plainly considered a dump. He sat at the card table in a kind of prissy upright way that indicated a fear that the dump was about to rub off on him.

“What’s this stuff?”

“Tofu.”

“Part of the alternate lifestyle?”

“No, protein.”

I hated to tee him up like this, but he couldn’t go home unless I got some weight off him.

Dad owned a booking agency for corporate and private aircraft and had to act as if he could afford what he booked, but just watching him handle my thrift-shop silverware you could tell that he was and always would be a poor boy. He felt that he had clambered up a few rungs, and his big fear was that I was clambering back down. As a tradesman — I run a construction crew — I had clearly fallen below the social class to which my father thought I should belong. He believed that the fine education he’d paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it’s true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success, I and many of my classmates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts. I had friends who’d trained as historians, literary scholars, and philosophers who were now shoeing horses, wiring houses, and installing toilets. There’d been no suicides so far.

My father believed that anything done for pleasure was escapism, except, of course, when it came to seducing his secretaries and most of my mother’s friends. He and my mother had been a glamorous couple early in their marriage; good looks, combined with assertive tastemaking, had put them on top in our shabby little city. Then I came along, and Mother thought I’d hung the moon. In Dad’s view, I put an end to the big romance. When I was a toddler, Dad caught Mom in the arms of our doctor on the screened back porch of the doctor’s fish camp. (Though there must have been some ambivalence about the event, because we continued to accept perch fillets from Dr. Hudson’s pond.) A few years later, when the high-school PE teacher caught the doctor atop his bride and shot him, Mother cried while Dad tilted his head to the side, elevated his eyebrows, and remarked, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

As an only child, I was the sole recipient of my parents’ malignant parenting. Their drinking took place entirely in the evening and followed a rigid pattern: with each cocktail they became increasingly thin skinned, bristling at imaginary slights. When I was young, they occasionally tried to throw me into the middle of their fights (“I don’t believe this! She actually bit me!”), but I developed a suave detachment (“The Band-Aids are in the cupboard behind the towels”). In a real crisis, my mother brought in our neighbor Zoe Constantine for consolation, unaware that Pop had been making the two-backed beast with Zoe since I was in fifth grade — which happened to be the same year that my mother superglued Dad to the toilet seat, so perhaps she had her suspicions.

I asked about her now, not without anxiety. “She’s in bed with a bottle and the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” my father said. He was proud of this remark — I’d heard it before. Although my mother read a lot, she was never “in bed with a bottle.” Most likely, she was out playing golf with her friend Bernardine from the typing pool over at Ajax.

My mother comes from a Southern family, though she’s always lived in the North, and she has a tiny private income that has conditioned the dialogue since my childhood. Like a bazillion others of Southern origin, she is a remote beneficiary of some Atlanta pharmacist’s ingenuity, Coca-Cola — not a big remittance but enough to fuel Dad’s rage against entitlement. That money had much to do with his determination to keep my mother within sight of smokestacks all her life. As did his belief that everything outside the Rust Belt was fake. To him, the American Dream was a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound interior lineman from a bankrupt factory town with five-second forties, a long contract with the Colts, and a bonus for making the Pro Bowl.

In the morning, we went out to my job site, and I felt happy at once. Everything there seemed to buoy my spirits: the caked mud on the tires of a carpenter’s truck, the pleasant oily smell of tools, the cool wind coming through the sage on the hill, a screaming Skil saw already at work, the smell of newly cut two-by-fours, a nail gun going off in the basement, three thermoses on an unfinished ledge.

The doctor who’d hired me wanted a marshy spot behind the house excavated for a pond, and I had my Nicaraguan, Ángel, out there with a backhoe, trying to find the spring down in the mud so that we could plumb it and spread some bentonite to keep the water from running out. So far, all we’d found was mud and buffalo skulls, which Ángel was piling to one side. I told Dad that this had once been a trap made by Indians, but he wasn’t all that interested. He was drawn to the Nicaraguan, whom he considered someone real on a machine — despite the heavy Central American accent, Dad had found his Rust Belt guy out here among all the phonies in cowboy hats. And Ángel was equally attracted to Dad’s all-purpose warmth. He slid back his ear protectors and settled in for a chat.

Evidently, I’d had a flat tire as I pulled up to the site, left front, and it was a motherfucker getting the spare out of a three-quarter-ton Ford, the Ford jacked up on the soft ground, and the whole muddy wheel into the bed to take to town. At the tire shop, Dad looked weird in his slacks and loosened tie, amid all the noise from impact wrenches and the compressors screaming and shutting down, but nobody seemed to notice. He gazed admiringly at the big rough kid in a skullcap running a pry bar around the rim and freeing up the tire. The kid reached inside the tire, tugging and sweating, and presented me with an obsidian arrowhead. I nearly cut myself just taking it from his hand. “Six plies of Jap snow tire and it never broke,” he said. I went up front and paid for the repair.