Nothing but Blue Skies (17 page)

They listened to the local news and weather as Frank finished cooking and Holly set the table. She laid out the utensils and napkins; she centered the hot pad and then Frank served the meal and poured the beer. They sat down and Holly sighed.

“This is it,” said Frank.

“No food on the plane. I’m ready.”

Frank gazed with pride at his own cooking. Most of the time, he ate Lean Cuisine microwave dinners, Campbell’s tomato soup or leftovers dumped into half-limp taco shells while fixated on the livestock reports, the index of leading indicators, new home starts, west Texas intermediate crude or some other fool thing that seemed to connect him with the economics games there were to be played. In some ways, he loved money; he certainly loved the sedative effects of pursuing it, and if that was all money did for him at this point, it had much to be said for it. The year he tried to escape into bird-watching, into all the intricacies of spring warblers and the company of gentle people, he had been forced to conclude that nothing got him out of bed with quite the smooth surge of power — as the Chrysler ads used to say — like the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Also, he was good at it and always had been. His mother had said he had his father’s nose: he could pick up the scent of a deal from a good ways off, as sharks are said to do with blood. He actually had the knack to a greater degree than his father.

“I regard this as a quality family atmosphere,” Frank said to Holly.

The superb golden light of evening came down through the leaves of the Norwegian silver maple and through the windows of
the dining room and lit up their faces and the things on the table.

“Who’s your current boyfriend?”

“A fellow named Mark Plante.”

“I don’t like the sound of this. What’s he like?”

“Kind of a comical little nitwit. He won’t be around long.”

“I like this guy more and more.”

“There’s plenty where he came from. They’re like fleas on a dog. I’ve had several lunches with the leader of a citizens’ group. I’ve also had a few attentions from a young history professor.”

“They’ve begun preying on the students, have they?”

“I thought they always have.”

“Well, with these bountiful federal grants, there’s more time for dalliance than there was in my day.”

“They had other problems in your time — keeping you people from breaking into the president’s office and smoking the cigars, burning the flag, describing the pink spiders crawling out of your desks to the biology professor who can’t seem to make them out.”

“Don’t ridicule, Holly. That stuff’s coming back. What about this bird from the citizens’ group? Haven’t I heard of him?”

“He gets in the papers from time to time. He wants to keep Montana for Montanans.” Holly smiled with a new potato rakishly poised on a fork. “Would you ever let your hair grow again?”

“No. I don’t think any of us would. It’s better to hide these secrets. To infiltrate. To duly note the action of the scavengers who have followed us down the great American highway.”

“The secret drifter.”

“The secret drifter.”

“You
are
a drifter, aren’t you, Daddy? In your heart?”

“A drifter.”

“But you don’t move much anymore.”

“This is my home. Recently, though, I visited the Eskimos.”

“And?”

“About what you would expect, sans igloos. They’re in a place that’s hard to live and it seems to get them down. They have TV. They know what’s going on. They want to know why they got dealt the permafrost. There are anthropologists and sociologists
up there teaching them to curse their fate and cast their blame in a wide circle.”

“I don’t understand what you were doing there.”

“I wanted to get away. Remember Mama’s friend Lucy? She’s a travel agent. I told her to just put a little trip together for me that would really be a break. I told her I’d go anywhere she sent me.”

“How is Lucy, anyway?”

“She’s bored, a fine person. She sits under the posters of tropic isles and doesn’t really care if anyone goes anywhere or not. You hear it in her voice. She doesn’t have that big belief, that Kathie Lee Gifford sort of booming view of people getting out and about on a cruise ship. She doesn’t really see why anyone bothers. And of course this pops up on the balance sheet as self-fulfilling prophecy —” He stopped abruptly. He could hear himself talking exactly as he would if he were talking to Gracie. When he looked at Holly, who was not eating but simply gazing both fondly and reflectively at him, he knew she was having the same thought, or something very much like the same thought.

“Do you know why I stopped talking?” he inquired.

“Yup.”

“I thought so. Well, what can you do.”

Holly said, “I’ll wash, you dry.”

He turned on the radio, the oldies station, and Van Morrison sang while they worked.

“As we boogie to the suds,” said Holly, arms deep in the soapy water, Frank with his towel and lost in his dreams. “I know you’re thinking about Mama,” she said.

That night Frank lay in bed and watched the full moon from his window, the great pure shape rising through the telephone lines, the treetops and over the roofs to race cool and smooth and alone
in the sky. Its pale light barely illuminated the distant mountains. He couldn’t sleep. He almost felt he’d gotten a hold of the moon and was being towed along in the chill.

He wondered what was to become of Holly. She was certainly the most reliable person he knew, filled with plans she was capable of achieving. He did not think she was liable to be swept away by someone she had failed to size up correctly. He liked life’s randomness, its buckshot absurdity and disconnections, but he didn’t like them for his daughter. The story possibilities for his life were getting narrower by the minute and randomness was perhaps what his life needed. Holly, he thought, needed narrowing story possibilities. Lying in his own panel of cold moonlight, Frank thought only of the madmen, the crazy drivers, the pretty boys, the flamboyant professors, the head of the citizens’ group, the careerists. He was worried sick about Holly and that was that.

Frank and Holly carried their coffee outside into the cool morning. The early sun slanted across the street in bands between the rows of spruce and silver maples. The street climbed rapidly to the south, and on either side were the old pioneer houses with their eclectic and eccentric architecture. They walked along and looked up onto the old porches, the hidden off-center doorways and the neat clapboard walls, the tall chimneys with recessed sides and fancy crenellated tops.

Frank didn’t want to eat at the Holiday Inn for fear of running into June, whom Holly liked but who seemed, when anybody else was around, entirely too raucous for Frank’s taste. And invariably, she tried to get Frank to buy Holly another car, a Buick, when she already had a good one, a jaunty green Honda Civic. Frank thought he was bending over backward in the friendship anyway by driving a Buick he couldn’t bear, a car as loose-jointed and ungainly as Rozinante. So they went to the Dexter; but it was such a beautiful day, they ordered the Travelers’ Special in order to get back outside as soon as possible. He thought Holly might want to fish, but today she just wanted to visit the ranch. He didn’t mention that he and Mike had decided to sell it.

On three different occasions, as they walked back up Main, people swerved toward them and waved gaily to Holly. “Who’s
that?” Frank asked each time, and it was always some old friend from high school. He said she had a lot of friends and she agreed unaffectedly. When he added that they could use some help with their driving, she gave him a look of comic exasperation. She had been more or less humoring her father since she was six or seven, or at least, when times got tough, tolerating him.

Holly sat in the car looking out at the pastures, her door open, one foot on the ground. He considered telling her that he and Mike were going to sell the place. He knew he wasn’t paying as much attention to its management as he should. Frank’s father had wanted Holly to own a piece of family land one day. Holly was the only person to whom his father had ever shown open affection, and when his mother had told him that this was the only way the old man knew how to show the emotion for Frank he had never been able to express, Frank didn’t believe her. Anyway, he didn’t think he ought to be asked to believe it. At thirty-eight years of age he had found himself tearfully telling his mother, “If he loved me, he should have said so.”

When he remembered that moment, he writhed with discomfort. But that wasn’t fair either. His mother assumed that it was her fault. He felt worse, and deserved to feel worse. He had spent half a lifetime directing his dissatisfaction with his father at her. Does anyone really mind? he wondered today. Or does the world just go on by, like one of June’s Buicks, with some fool’s foot through the firewall. Maybe it was just more of that outlandish concept of his youth, “lonely teardrops,” romantic solitude at its most heightened, made into a way of life for a middle-aged man.

They began walking, and followed the little creek that came down through the corral, a muddy-banked trickle that grew as they followed it up into the timothy pasture where it forked. Above the fork it was bigger still and had more speed, deep and undercut, and finally when they were both winded, it was a real mountain stream bouncing through the junipers. The new movement of morning air up the slope carried the wild grass smells on the blue light. They could see across the valley into a tall, absolute
sky. Frank looked over and thought, I have the sweetest little girl in the world. Why not have a thought like that? he asked himself.

“Let’s sit here.”

“I’d love to,” said Frank, and did a split-knee lowering of himself to the ground and put his knuckles together, fingers turned up in imitation of a meditative pose.

“No, no, no,” said Holly, and sat in a correct lotus position, face elevated perfectly into the breaking day. “Like this.”

“I could do it if I had a beer,” said Frank.

“Boy, you look apprehensive.”

“I am apprehensive.”

Holly gazed vaguely across the valley. They could hear the train heading for Bozeman but couldn’t see it. The whole valley was a green and gold grid of farmland and country roads and silver threads of irrigation. One big sprinkler gun to the west drew a pale drifting feather of water across a dark green stand of alfalfa. From this perspective, the valley seemed quite unsettled. The warmth of the new day was making the air hazy over the irrigated ground.

“What we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about Mama,” she said.

“Uh-
huh
.” Frank stretched his legs out in front of himself and leaned forward to try to touch his toes.

“Okay?” Holly tried to prod him.

“Let me think.”

“I honestly believe you owe it to me.”

“ ‘Owe.’ I see.” Frank’s first instinct was that she looked far too much like her mother for this conversation to be anything but squeamish. “I don’t know where to start,” he said. She wasn’t looking at him and she wasn’t looking at anything in front of her. A little dust devil picked up a twist of yellow cottonwood leaves and flung them.

“Let me start, then. First of all, I think the wake or the funeral, or whatever it was, was unnecessary.”

“It was necessary to me.”

“In what sense?”

“I had to close that chapter of my life, darling. I was in terrific pain.”

She reached over and held his hand but did not quite soften the expression of determination on her face. He felt his heart racing. She said, “And I consider that group of pallbearers to be a no-good bunch of traitors.”

“Sweetheart, they were simply my friends. They wanted what was best for me. They wanted me to be happy. They knew that my heart was broken. I’ll always be grateful for the way they carried some of that pain away.” Frank was conscious of a stuffy, artificial tone creeping into his voice, obviously meant to hold Holly at a certain distance. His mind kept trying to escape into the idea of buying a sports car, another thousand yearlings. Time had taken something away from the funeral.

“Did any of you wonder what that outrageous wake must have made me feel like?”

Frank thought for a moment. “Maybe we didn’t think about that as much as we should have.”

“Going down Main Street with a
coffin?
A loudspeaker truck playing ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones? The pallbearers were all … bombed. Very few people in that huge crowd had ever even met Mama. Some of them believed she really died! It was a disgrace and now it has become a famous disgrace, the big event of the last ten years.”

“Well, it was a lot of fun for some people. Folks remember the good times.”

“Oh, boy.”

Frank scratched around in the dirt with the point of a stick. He was in trouble with Holly.

“Want to play tic-tac-toe?”

“No.”

“So, what is this?”

“I’m going to graduate one of these days. I’m going to come back here to live. Mama’s having a pretty tough time. Maybe she’d want to come back. But how could she, after that stupid funeral? Or was that the whole point?”

Frank lay back on the deep wild grass and all he could see was sky, a few white clouds, nothing but blue sky.

“I don’t know what to say.” He sounded like a little kid. He felt kind of funny.

Holly was peering at him. “You really don’t, do you.”

“It just doesn’t seem like the conversation I should be having with you.”

“Are you uncomfortable?”

“
Yes, I’m uncomfortable
.”

They drove back to town when they got hungry, and Holly made him eat in the health food store, with its otherworldly waitresses and bland food. Then they went to the used bookstore, where he found
The Conspiracy of Pontiac
by Francis Parkman and Holly found
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, which had unfortunately been recommended to her by the head of the citizens’ group, Lane Lawlor. They went to the hardware store and bought a Rainbird sprinkler and a hummingbird feeder. Later in the afternoon Holly went to see her friends and Frank went home to try to catch up on some work.