Nothing but Blue Skies (16 page)

“Hello, Mrs. Jarrell. Just looking in. I know you’ve had some troubles lately. Anything you need? Anything I can do?”

“Oh, Mr. Copenhaver, leave it to you to worry about me. I’m adjusting quite well, thank you. In fact, I start today on a continuing education program up to the university. I don’t know if I told you this, but next year I plan to run for the United States Senate. I guess it was time I got on with my own life. I suppose I should thank you for firing Boyd. He got a great job at the White House, greeting dignitaries. George Bush will go anywhere to find hidden talent.”

“I just got lucky. Boyd playfully knocked my hat off my head. When I stooped to pick it up, I suddenly felt a new understanding to his working future.”

“We all just need our own space,” said Mrs. Jarrell. Evidently
she felt it was time Frank knew more about her body because she …

The panel truck slid to a stop at Frank’s door and its horn blew continuously. Frank could practically reach out and touch the driver. And Frank could tell by the way the red-faced man was beating his steering wheel with both fists that he had not been driving attentively. He ducked his head apologetically and drove through. Pay attention or die, he told himself.

Wonderful suburbs! Wonderful with their regular streets and amiable rivalry of lawns! They were as successful as that assemblage of animals that make up a coral reef. Frank strolled through the heartening rectangles of Antelope Heights, savoring the color schemes, the orderly parking habits, the individuality of the mailboxes — some mounted on wagon wheels, some of fiberglass with brightly colored pheasants molded into the sides (must be a hunter in there!), some that anticipated only letters and some that anticipated great big packages. One or two lawns had the outlines of snarling rottweilers with blazing red eyes on stakes driven into the sod to indicate the presence of a guard dog, but by now everyone knew you just bought the sign and saved on dog food. There was a sweet cacophony of sounds which included television, radio, stereo, practice on musical instruments and the muffled shop tools in the basements of hobbyists. Frank wanted to be here among the families, to watch them in their ordinariness, that most elusive of all qualities. To simply carry on and ignore all that is unthinkable seemed to require a special gift; and, in the end, the world belonged to those who never thought about nuclear holocaust, the collapse of the biosphere or even their own perfectly predictable deaths. Carry on! Who made the playoffs? Let’s eat! Let’s eat something!

Frank walked softly past one of the rottweiler signs toward the well-lighted outline of a small mock Tudor painted in the cheerful colors of the Bahamas, pink and blue. There was a side yard that separated this house from its neighbor, a house with a For Sale sign in its yard, perfectly dark so that Frank could observe this family without thinking about the house behind him. Unfortunately, when he reached the beginning of the side yard, the guard dog exploded into his view, rigid against a short length of steel chain. Its rage and astonishment at finding Frank there reduced its snarl to something so internal as to be past a warning and simply the prelude to an attack.

“Ooh, datsa big fellow,” Frank murmured, backing away. He made himself feel, through waves of terror, real affection for this dog on the theory that any insincerity on his part and the dog would uproot the chain and tear his face off, leaving not even lips to offer an explanation to the homeowners. Frank made like a love-sodden star of some Podunk gospel hour and backed away into the next yard where he fell over the For Sale sign. A floodlight went on and, even though he was seated on the lawn, he cast a long black shadow in its harsh light. There was somebody standing on the front porch of the house.

“Frank?”

“Yes?”

“Frank Copenhaver?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Steve Jensen.”

“Oh hey, Steve!”

Steve, one of the doctors who rented from Frank, was having a wonderful time atop Phil’s wife Kathy, a remarkable lapse in his closely planned life. Frank was conscious of the acrimony over the clinic rent. He was even more sensitive to looking like an intruder.

“Frank, what are you doing?”

Frank decided to go into microfocus. “Tripped over this blasted sign,” he called out. “Fell on my butt!” He had a hold of the stake of the sign and was looking closely at the lettering. He could see the brush strokes in the paint.

Jensen walked over to where Frank now stood dusting the seat of his trousers. He looked at Frank blankly and then very slowly a knowing smile came over his face. He laughed to himself. Frank just waited. Jensen looked off, smiling, then turned back to Frank. “You’re checking out this house, Frank. I know you. You don’t want the realtors knowing you’re interested. Talk about your covert operations!”

“You gonna tell?”

“No, I’m not gonna tell.”

Frank batted him playfully on the shoulder. “You promise you’re not gonna tell?”

“I promise I’m not going to tell.”

“Steve —”

“What?”

“I owe you one.” Frank dropped his head submissively.

Frank declined Steve’s offer of a drink. He didn’t want to get into anything intimate about the clinic, much less discuss his hosing Phil’s wife. Gesturing to the house next door, Frank said that he had seen enough, and indeed he had; but the desire for the ordinary was still in him and it was heightened the minute he contemplated returning to his empty house. Steve commented that it was amusing that Frank even left his car elsewhere, calling it “extreme realtor fear.”

Frank could only go along with these spiraling witticisms. These days, everything took such a long explanation, it was turning smart people into mutes. Combining the knowing look with absentmindedness was the great modern social skill as far as Frank was concerned, and he thought he had it down pretty fair. It would never occur to the doctor that this was a new Frank, certainly not the one who acquired and managed the clinic so acceptably over the years. This was the night Frank. This was the solitaire who feared that happiness was past. This was the roaming dog.

But he had extraordinary luck just a few blocks away, a couple helping their daughter, who was maybe twelve years old, with her homework. They sat around the kitchen table, the mother right
next to the struggling child, the father sipping coffee and pitching in when he had an answer. Frank tried to remember how much of this he had done with Gracie and Holly. He tried to be ironic about the golden light that flooded these three people from the opulent globe over the table. The schoolbook lay open in front of the pretty child next to a heap of marvelously rumpled papers. Steam rose from the coffee. The mother had pinned her hair up to keep it out of her way. The father sharpened a pencil. Frank thought these people had not always lived in town and were buoyed by the convenience of their suburb, the handy shopping, the populous grade school. Good grief, it was an American family! Frank rested his chin on the windowsill and gazed upon this rapturous scene, shriven by time, tears pouring down his face. We used to be one of those, he told himself. We had that in our hands.

Frank put his car in the short-term parking lot and walked into the airport, a low and rustic-looking modern terminal just past which could be seen the tall silver tail of an airplane. It was dusk and the airplane was tinted with the dusty pink of sunset. Frank was sure it wasn’t Holly’s plane, and when he got inside he found he had almost ten minutes to spare.

He stopped at the newsstand and bought the paper, skimmed the local news and left it on a plastic chair. The plane on the ground was being loaded and there was a short line at the security x-ray. A few of the older and more countrified travelers who perhaps had not flown much put their purses and other belongings on the conveyor belt with extreme suspicion. Frank hunted around for a tearful goodbye and found one, a plain girl in dowdy navy blue slacks and jumper, squeezing the hand of a vague-looking youth with long sideburns and a catfish mustache; she wept silently. She stared into his face almost imploringly while he gazed around in a rubbernecked way, as if to say, “Get a load of this.”

Frank was eager to see which one was leaving. When the ticket agent announced the final boarding call, the girl released the young man’s hand and boarded the plane. The young man looked around anxiously to see if anyone had been watching, and in case someone had, he wiped his brow with the back of his hand and
flicked the imaginary drops of perspiration to the ground. In a matter of time, Frank thought, this loving relationship would be converted into a marriage.

Frank joined the mixed group at the big window in scanning the sky for the next inbound flight. For some reason, he remembered a winter trip to St. George, Utah, he had taken with Gracie and Holly. He and Gracie had had an argument at their motel and Holly pretended to be drowning in the swimming pool. It was a realistic imitation of a drowning person — face down, limbs slowly sinking — and it ended the argument. Frank and Gracie were startled that Holly would go to such lengths. The desert abruptly seemed pointless.

A glint appeared to the north, right at the level of the horizon, and began to enlarge. A moment later, the plane was taxiing at right angles to the terminal, a good way off, and then it turned and came straight in — pure, pretty silver, pink in the dusk with wriggling heat waves behind it and a big sound that suddenly penetrated the building.

Frank stared at every passenger emerging from the expanding tunnel that attached itself to the plane. Some passengers took their own sweet time getting off and held up people behind them. After the first press, only a few passengers remained and Frank was afraid Holly wasn’t among them. But then she emerged, burdened by carry-on luggage, magazines and rolled-up newspapers, with the beaming smile that still filled Frank with complete happiness. She affected a rolling, impatient sailor’s gait until the last passengers were out of her way.

He put his arms all the way around Holly and her luggage and squeezed. It was wonderful to feel plain love, even stupid love, just this sense of everything mattering all at once. He began hanging the luggage from one arm as he unloaded it from Holly’s. “Do you have a suitcase?”

“Nope, this is it.”

They walked toward the lobby. Frank gazed at her from the side while she walked, looking straight ahead, occasionally smiling at him. Holly had a serenely pretty olive face with brown,
almost black, eyes that were as intense as the eyes of a sleek, quick animal. But when she grinned every bit of her face was affected in a crinkled way that swept Frank away with appreciation. She was wearing baggy cotton pants and a washed-out pink mountaineer’s jersey. She had an old green bookbag with a drawstring of the kind that prevailed during Frank’s college years. And she wore a big, cheap man’s wristwatch without a strap safety-pinned to the jersey. She looked a little like her mother, but even more definitely she had inherited Gracie’s careless prettiness and the unpretentious assumption that, somehow, she was being admired. Our only child, thought Frank. It’s true!

They got in the car and started toward town. Along the road out to Seventh, clouds of grackles showered down from power lines and swept back up again. Holly picked up one of Frank’s cassettes and smiled. “Can I play this?”

Neil Young filled the car, guitar feedback and all. Holly played it loud and looked out the window at the weedy ditches flying by, the crazy, day-in-and-day-out blue sky of Montana, and the mournful howl of Neil Young: “Your Cadillac got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” It was funny, Frank thought, how that tone of apocalypse just kind of went away.

When the song was finished, Holly turned it off and looked fondly at Frank. She said, “Dad.”

“Weird Dad,” Frank said.

“Weird Dad.” She punched out the cassette and held it up. As she peered at it, it seemed to acquire the quality of an artifact. “Where do you find these things?”

“They find them when they demolish old mansions.”

“Like you used to do?”

“Yeah. They tore down this copper baron’s mansion in Butte. The walls were filled with Bob Dylan. When they got to the attic there was a mountain of Big Brother and the Holding Company posters and Jefferson Airplane albums nearly devoured by pack rats.” Frank was getting into this. He saw the black hand of times gone by lying on this treasure trove.

For some reason, Holly liked to toy with the idea of her parents’
great and irreversible ancientness. She loved anecdotes about the sixties, which she associated with her father; she viewed him as a romantic rebel of ambiguity. She knew that he not only wasn’t fighting or protesting, he was demolishing the mansions and heirlooms of unguarded America. He was furnishing franchises with salad bars — and he never ate salad. He hated salad. He liked T-bones and potatoes. He even tried to tear down Mama’s indigo plantation! This last was a shared family-origin tale, though Mama owned no such plantation. Daddy the opportunist appears on the levee with a wrecking bar in his hand and a Los Angeles restaurant-chain contract in his hip pocket like a four-shot derringer. Gracie allowed a barbaric rakishness to seep into her version of Frank’s fomenting the spread of neon down the Mississippi. Holly always wanted to hear little stories of how they met and married.

“What would you like to eat?”

“Are you cooking for me?”

“Have I ever not?”

Holly puzzled through the tense, then said, “No, you’ve never not.”

Frank had already started her favorite, a monster of calories and simplicity known as New England boiled dinner, featuring corned beef, rutabaga, new potatoes, hot mustard and coarse grain bread he got from the Blue Moon bakery, whose sweet-smelling baked goods were proscribed by every responsible doctor. And beer. He loved to guzzle yellow cans of Coors with his beautiful daughter and talk football, school work, America, money, romance, the evolving life of the Great American West.

She always asked about his fishing. Sometimes he showed her a new rod or an English reel or curious flies like sparkle duns and olive emergers and flashabou woolly buggers. They’d pull open his desk drawer at home and peer into the pewter-colored fly boxes with their exotic mysteries of silk and steel and feathers. He’d mention favorite river names: the Sixteen, the Ruby, the Madison, the Jefferson, the Bow, the Crow’s Nest, the Skykomish, the Dean. When she was a little girl, he would make up stories
that took place in the great drainages like the Columbia or the Skeena or the Missouri, and the place names would restore their years together. He could still thrill her with the story about the time the great brown trout towed his canoe past the city of Helena in the middle of the night, past the glow of its lights on the night sky of August, a fish he had to break off at the head of thundering rapids whose standing waves curved five feet high in the cold white moonlight.