Nothing but Blue Skies (14 page)

“Come on in,” said Sheriff Hykema, and Frank followed him into a nearly dark den where a baseball game was on television. Hykema picked up the channel changer and muted the game, then gestured for Frank to sit in one of the deep chairs that faced the television. Hykema sat in the other.

“How you feeling?”

“Better than I deserve. I’m afraid I remember a couple of things I said to you last night —”

“This morning.”

“Right. And I sure apologize.”

“Don’t give it a thought,” Hykema said. “Let me see if they’re
going to call that foul.” He turned the sound back on for a moment, then off again.

“Well, I am sorry.”

“I hear that sort of thing every day.”

“Well, I wish it hadn’t happened, but it did.”

Hykema gave him a long look, disinterested, almost scientific in its detachment. “You must have had a lot on your mind.”

Frank was able to meet his gaze. They both seemed to drift off on very different tracks, lit by the pale green image of the baseball diamond on television. It was very quiet. Suddenly, the sheriff seemed to come back into focus. He clapped his big hands down onto the thick fabric of the arms of his chair. “Copenhaver,” he said, “that’s the first time we’ve had you down at the jailhouse. I don’t know what your problem is, but when folks start appearing there, it usually ain’t an accident. A big portion of them keep reappearing until something real bad happens and then it’s too late to go back to where the problem started.”

Frank felt a ticklish surge to be receiving sincere advice. He could tell that his gratitude seemed a little out of place to Hykema, or exaggerated, further proof he had lost track of the normal. “I like to think it was an isolated event,” he said.

“I like to think it was an isolated event too. But a lot of times it isn’t.”

“That’s good to know,” said Frank. Everyone was so helpful.

Frank lay in his bed and listened to an educational radio program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, some kind of marathon in progress about the relationships between men and women. Frank paid attention for a while. There seemed to be an invisible audience that gave the background a hint of poll tax riots. A woman with the tiniest voice imaginable read a paper, “Pocahontas, First Governor of Virginia,” which was challenged by a man who sounded as if he were trying to talk around his pipe stem and who said that the myth of the coping female had led to nationalistic suicide in the South and to “the recycled panty hose of Robert E. Lee.” Frank’s feeling that he was already out of balance was exacerbated by this educational radio program and he turned it off with a diving twist of the knob. He lay in the dark wondering why he could be so disoriented by a program sent out to Americans by a happy government whose work resembled that of kindly parents who distributed colored eggs in the hedge and the garden the night before Easter. But maybe there was just too much spin on the eggs.

He managed to sleep through the night, off and on, breaking into the occasional moan and going to the bathroom three or four times just to have something to do. Day came in a gray opening of minor renewal. Frank got up and clung to his routines of breakfast
and bathing. When he shaved, he examined his face over and over with his hand to check for missed spots. This day could be set back easily by a missed spot, a lone whisker in a weird place. He put on polished cotton slacks and blue socks, a pair of Church’s English oxfords, a green-striped Egyptian cotton shirt and a green and red silk tie. He brushed his hair until not one hair was out of line and his scalp tingled sharply. He applied St. Johns bay rum. He put on a light gray seersucker jacket and stood in front of the floor-length mirror raising and lowering his chin until it was at just the exact level. He tried smiling mirthlessly, then let it go back to neutral. He smiled sincerely and decided that he still got a pretty big reading off a sincere-looking smile even though, as was usual in business, it was apropos of nothing. Then he headed for the Holiday Inn for the early bird breakfast and there was June.

“Oh, God,” she said, “join me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. What’ve you been doing?”

“I was in jail yesterday.”

“I thought they’d have you in.”

“No, this was different. This was a bar scrape.”

“Who started it?”

“I did.”

“Shame on you. That’s the old you.”

Frank told her about the experiment in front of the dressing mirror, trying out different expressions, preparing for insincerity. He said most of it was about conquering women, no matter how deeply it was buried.

“What is it about you guys?” she said.

“I know,” said Frank. “Something’s not right.”

“You know, we get horny too.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But we don’t go around trying to lead platoons over it.”

“Yes, yes, we couldn’t be bigger pigs,” he demurred.

“A couple of nights ago, I was feeling the strain,” said June. “I rented an X-rated video.”

“No.”

“Called
Businessman’s Lunch
.”

“How was it?”

“Terrible. The main character was certainly not a businessman. You would have been irate. They put him in front of a row of boxes with a clipboard in his hand and had him pretend to go over the inventory.” June’s rather loud and raspy voice got her an audience once again, the usual airline personnel and early delivery people, not many, half a dozen or so sleepy eaters waiting for their coffee to work. Then the waitress interrupted things and they ordered. When the waitress left, June resumed. Frank thought that by looking around boldly he could keep people from listening, but it was hopeless.

“Naturally, our boy seduces everybody and that had its appeal, though anyone with a room-temperature IQ would quickly get bored with the oral business under the desk. It was one of the most ineffective ads for office furniture I’ve ever sat through.” Frank shrank as though dashed with cold water. “But the scene that seems very important to these movies is the festive ejaculation. This scene is shot like a Disney nature film, in slow motion. We get the holiday droplets flying through the air with frequent cutaways to the ‘businessman.’ Our man is reared back, howling like a baboon and apparently trying to uproot his own member like a stoop worker on an Alabama row-crop farm. This does not look too bright.” Frank sheepishly stole a glance around the room; the show was a big hit. “Meanwhile, the starlet seems to have forgotten she’s in a movie. She scoots around on the queen-size, trying to avoid the barrage.” An appliance repairman with the dead-giveaway blond bangs of a born-again Christian came to their table. The script on his shirt read “Rance.”

“Ma’am,” he said from a smoldering face.

“Don’t tell me you’re the director,” cried June.

“Ma’am, I’m gonna tell Holiday Inn, nice folks can’t eat in this place if you’re here.”

“They’re crazy about me,” said June. “They’ll throw out the nice folks. Might try Days Inn.”

The waitress arrived as Rance drifted back sullenly to his table,
right after he suggested that if June hadn’t been a woman, something very dire would have awaited her. June turned to her breakfast with delight. “I must be his first dirty old broad.”

“Must be,” said Frank.

June spread jam on her toast. She held it up admiringly. “Imagine living such a sheltered life,” she mused. “I think Holiday Inns sustain those illusions. There’s never any discord in the Holiday Inn.”

They ate with reflective gazes for a time. They were both thinking. Rance got up after a bit, shoving back his chair noisily so as to suggest that he had never had waffles under such circumstances before. June blew him a pouty kiss and went back to contemplatively eating. In this eternal ambience, with its perfect standardization, exemplary and American, Frank felt he could age quietly or be part of a trend. The pressure was more on time itself than it was on him. This thought alone took some of the pressure off.

He tried to make it through an entire day at the office. Eileen had him stacked up with calls to return and letters to respond to. He had to sort out gas line easements across the ranch. The city was asking him to abandon an old head gate that was now on the grounds of a small park. There was a request from the doctors to confirm that they could always lease at their current rate, which Frank responded to with a number of built-in slides for inflation, cost of living, exhausted depreciation schedules and the offer to raise the rent at once. There was a call from Phil to say that he and Smokie were going to the movies, if he wanted to join them. No, he thought. The building that had housed Gracie’s old lunch-counter restaurant, Amazing Grease, was being converted to a light-truck repair shop and the shop’s proprietor was making an offer to purchase it. Again, Frank declined. He sent the animal shelter written permission to exercise animals on the ranch and he tried to return his brother Mike’s five telephone calls but failed to find him in. He prorated Boyd Jarrell’s last paycheck and asked Eileen to call him and find out what he wanted done with his tax and workmen’s comp withholdings. Eileen returned to say that
Boyd was out of town but that the wife wanted the money forwarded to her. “Okay,” Frank said, “do that.” He felt quite absent. He was thinking about his house. He was thinking he could barely picture it and didn’t want to live there anymore. Once a poetic edifice, it had become an annoying heap.

He recognized that he was going to have to move his mind more into the foreground and out of the world of regrets and ambiguities. The desk was piled high with reminders of neglect. He couldn’t run a business this way. “You can’t run a business this way,” he said aloud. He thought he heard Eileen say “Amen,” but he knew very well she didn’t have that sort of wit. He must have imagined it. It did seem, though, that he had heard an “amen.”

He met Mike at a quarter of twelve at McDonald’s for a quick lunch to discuss something on Mike’s mind. It was already crowded at this old fast food place, with its amusement park shapes and colors now well battered by Montana weather. Even the fiberglass animals and carousel horses looked like they’d come up the trail with the longhorns. Inside, the stainless steel handrail in front of the counter was bowed out toward the condiment and napkin counter by the pressure of tens of thousands of buttocks.

This was Mike’s favorite restaurant. He prided himself on being a prosperous professional who had never developed an interest in the good life: “I live like a dog and I eat like a dog.” This wasn’t quite true, and in Mike’s identification with ordinary people there was a kind of dandyism. They carried their trays to a small table in front of a window where they could see traffic and the pretty farmhouses across the road that had been overtaken by the strip; their deep and shady porches now faced a blazing modern highway. When they sat down, Frank unwrapped his cheeseburger and tipped the cardboard container of french fries on its side.

“My doctor friends say you’re trying to gouge them on the office building.” Mike made this statement with a crazy grin.

“Cheapskates.”

“You got that right. But again, they’re my friends.”

“Why don’t they leave?”

“I don’t know.”

Mike rarely asked Frank to come to McDonald’s. Meeting there for lunch almost always meant something, since even by Mike’s standards the dining was not the issue. When their mother had been in the nursing home, after the fiasco in Fort Myers, she had gone rapidly downhill. Frank tried having her at home and so did Mike, but she no longer knew where she was and would prowl about at all hours. Once she set fire to Mike’s house trying to cook on the gas stove at three
A.M
. One of Mike’s children found her, nightgown on fire, and Mike had to spray her with a fire extinguisher. “Go ahead, kill me!” she had cried.

Adding to their problems was the fact that she had never liked them as children. She had been a famous local beauty and children had never fit her plans. She had associated Mike and Frank with her decline throughout her life, so that by the time she was old and infirm she openly disliked them. But she got pneumonia from the fire extinguisher and nearly died. So they put her back in the home, which was pleasant but inhabited almost entirely by what looked to Frank like zombies, who sat and stared or held playing cards but didn’t play them or who waited for the meal bells or simply watched television with perfect vacancy or took on small tasks that didn’t need doing, like curtain arrangement or extra dusting.

Frank had loved his mother but got nothing much in return, and even Mike, who hadn’t cared, understood that his mother’s situation was not one to be desired. She reached the point that she no longer got out of bed, then no longer ate and was on life support equipment. This went on for a good while; they visited regularly even though most of the time she didn’t know they were there, and when she did, she was unpleasantly reminded of how little she liked them. Finally, she failed to return to consciousness altogether. After a couple of months, Mike called Frank with his decision. He had spoken to the doctor. An absence could be arranged if Mike and Frank wished to remove her life support system.

“I couldn’t do it,” said Frank.

“You don’t have to do it,” said Mike. “All you have to do is agree it needs to be done and I’ll do it.”

“I just don’t know, Mike.”

“Maybe she’s living in a bad dream, Frank. I’d want mine pulled.”

They agreed that they would do it. Frank wondered, after she died, what the actual moment of death had been: when this decision was reached, or when her pulse stopped and her temperature started down? It was actually Mike who removed the … stuff, the equipment, the tubing. The last thing she said — and they had to go back a number of weeks for this — was something that had just bubbled up from a Johnny Carson show she had seen, and they would never have known that except that Mike had seen the same show. In a crooning, faraway voice, she repeated the words of a famous model who was a guest on the show telling about her photo safari to Tanzania. Their mother seemed to become the model, down to peculiar expressions of enthusiasm like “off the graph”: “The lions were really off the graph!”