Nothing but Blue Skies (18 page)

He was dreaming:

“I would like to have sex with you,” Gracie said.

“That would be nice.”

“It’s more or less free, you know.”

“More or less?”

“Free. Plus options, taxes and dealer prep. Hope that eases the sticker shock.”

“It does.”

Where exactly were they? Frank woke up and stared toward the ceiling, not quite making it out in the faint light from the street. They were in Texas, that was it. Victoria? Corpus Christi? He couldn’t quite remember. It was outside of town in an old motel, so the sign said “Motor Court,” with mesquite and cat’s-claw growing right up to its dirt parking area. There was a little store across the road that said “Smith Gro.” The town was just beyond. Someone had painted on a viaduct, “El North Side.”

Frank leaned over on his stomach and adjusted the clock’s face toward himself. It was after three. It was awful lately, seeing all these crazy hours, which had remained undisclosed for years in a zone of sleep safety. There was a gasp of air brakes and Frank held himself, face sweating into the pillow, until his cock jolted in his fist. He thought lightly, This is no way to live. The phone rang and
was quickly picked up in the bedroom across the hall. Holly talking to a boyfriend in the dark. Three in the morning. Hot wires to Missoula.

Frank left before Holly awakened. He wrote her a note as he ate his breakfast, listening for movement in her room. She might have been on the phone for a long time. He walked to the office, taking in the songbirds’ cascade of music from the garden beds along his way. Birds are very important, he told himself, trying to peg in one value to start the day. An old man pulled handfuls of wet green grass clippings from beneath his lawn mower. Across the street, the yellow cherry-picker arm of a phone company truck rose slowly through the branches of a maple tree.

Eileen acknowledged him with the least movement of her chin she could manage. He had left her sequestered by paper mountains, offering no leadership whatsoever for weeks now. She could take anything — murder, mayhem — but not lack of management, and he could see her sullenness growing by the second. It was just like Boyd Jarrell. Frank was now what the Mexicans called a
perro enfermo
, a sick dog, something in his center not quite as it was supposed to be.

He was perfectly well aware of how he was letting things slip. Nevertheless, he went straight past to his own quarters, sat down and tried to reignite the importance of title reports, brand receipts, sharecropping contracts, rent receipts, tax assessments and reassessments, the basic paper trail of doom as he currently saw it; hostile letters from the Forestry Department, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife; partnership offers and get-rich-quick schemes as they were understood by a limited business environment such as his. He longed to prowl once more in the subdivisions where the tough insurance men and car dealers and rising doctors lived. He longed for the sight of a booze-disheveled bank vice president vaguely picking his nose over a Book-of-the-Month Club notice in his veneered den. He loved those rare moments of capturing people without their game faces on. By the time he got to work in the morning, the world was already in a three-point stance, resting its weight on its knuckles. He wanted
to reacquire that stance, learn what he had once known but what had seemed to slip away with his wife.

He had spent his life with his guard down and wanted to return the favor. He remembered when they first moved to town and the Episcopalians came out during the evenings before Christmas to carol. Frank and his family felt blurred and unfocused behind their window while the Episcopalians, with long scarves and song books, with real singing voices, tenors, basses, sopranos, baritones, round singing lips and red cheeks like people on Christmas cards, sang to the goofy Catholics in their house. “Look at them,” said his father, watching the snow sift down on their quality faces. “If I don’t bankrupt a few before it’s over, I won’t have lived.”

The first spell in town had been a strain. His parents fought continually in their small house, culminating in his father’s stringing a taut strand of barbed wire down the middle of the marital bed to make sure there would be no mingling. His mother complained that she couldn’t get the bedding on the mattress without great difficulty and that she didn’t want to be on his side anyway. “This way we’re sure,” said the old man, still trying to learn how to run his apartment building and live in town. He had a bunch of Indians in there too, loud reservation Cheyennes who were always cooking in the middle of the night and playing the radio.

Frank picked up his phone and asked Eileen to come in. He had made a list of minute things she could not possibly have remembered and put them in his top drawer, which was open just enough for him to read them, an old trick of his father’s. Eileen entered seeming to wonder what on earth he could want with her. Her discontent was taking new forms every day.

“Everything all right, Eileen?”

“Just fine,” she sang.

“That’s good. I’m afraid I have been a little absentminded lately, which can’t have been pleasant for you.” Silence. “But I’m sure you got along without me just fine.” Silence. Eileen smiled slightly and Frank’s eyes dropped to his list in the drawer. “Eileen. Couple of things. The Willow Creek place. I asked you to get the water rights adjudication info from the county. May I have it now?”

“When was this?”

“I asked you to get it two months ago.”

Eileen barely moved. “I’ll have to get it now.”

“I see, Eileen. Okay. And the double billing from the surveyors. Is that in hand?”

“I’ll have to check.”

“Where is the video cattle auction literature I asked for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

Frank slipped the drawer shut and tilted his chair back. He let the last trace of sound leave the room. Eileen was back on the job now and not wallowing in the managerial vacuum Frank had created. But he didn’t want to release her. There was something else. He didn’t know what it was yet, but he could feel it rising toward the surface with a slight dread. Then it was here.

“Tell me, Eileen, does my wife ever call you?”

Eileen looked down.

“I see. And what does she want?”

A helpless shrug.

“Does she want money?”

“——”

“She wants money, then.”

“No.”

“She doesn’t want money. Then what does she want?”

“I don’t know.”

“She wants information. Where is she, Eileen? And this time I want an answer.”

Eileen said, “You find out yourself, playboy.”

This was too astonishing. He had to imagine he had misheard. He tried to think of other words that sounded like “playboy.” Frank wandered to the window, his temples pounding. He had pushed Eileen too far. Instinctively he looked for the old couple, remembered the old man unwrapping his wife’s piece of candy. The sun slanted like an examining light into the corners of the yard. A bright and slumbrous column of dust marked a recently departed automobile. A magpie sat on the single telephone wire
that soared in and attached to the wall. He realized that Eileen had pretty much said what he thought she had said. He would come in from another direction.

“Quite right, Eileen,” said Frank. “I haven’t been what I should have been of late. We’ll see what we can do.”

Eileen listened and Frank imagined that she was comparing him perniciously to his own father. It left him with the feeling that in speaking to Eileen, he was never quite speaking for himself, with her mustiness of another era.

Frank adjusted the gooseneck lamp over the oak desk in his den and pulled up chairs for himself and Holly. Holly had been studying most of the day and had tied her hair back with a bandanna. “Let’s have a look,” she said. Frank opened the drawer and pulled out two aluminum fly boxes. Holly drew them toward herself and tipped open their lids. Inside, they each had twelve compartments with glassine covers that could be opened by tripping a small wire latch. About half the compartments were filled with flies. Holly frowned.

“Where are the pale morning duns?”

“Must be out of them.”

“Don’t go anywhere without pale morning duns.”

“I make the light Cahill do the work for me.”

“Not on big fish,” said Holly, “only on dumb fish. I see you have Adamses in about nineteen sizes.”

“I believe in the Adams.”

“The Adams is pretty vague.”

“It’s not vague. It’s a strong generalization.”

“Where’s the vise and stuff?”

Frank dug out his fly-tying vise, an old Thompson A, and set it up on his desk. He pulled out the lower left-hand drawer, revealing a collection of feathers and pieces of moose and deer hide,
small blue and white boxes of hooks, spools of different-colored threads and silk flosses. A nice smell of camphor arose and Holly took a deep breath.

“You and Uncle Mike are really going to sell the ranch?”

“If we can! All we need is a buyer! All he needs is American money! Who told you?”

“Uncle Mike.”

“I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Could it be sold before I get home again?”

“That would be too good to be true, but it could happen.”

“Then I’d like to go once more before I catch my plane.”

“Who’s picking you up in Missoula?”

“Mama.”

“Mama!”

“Yessir, this is a clean sweep. She wanted to come up and check out my boyfriend. Maybe she’ll give you a report. This boyfriend is special and I want you and Mama involved.”

“Well, send her my best.”

“I will. I’ll give her your best. I don’t know if I told you, I changed faculty advisers this term.”

“You didn’t tell me. You’re still a history major?”

“Still a history major.”

“Why did you change?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Dr. Carson — that was his name, huge redheaded guy — Dr. Carson had been reading all these statistics about increasing American ignorance ever since I got there. How many Americans had never heard of the Civil War, never heard of Roosevelt, couldn’t guess the dates of the First World War within fifty years, on and on. He collected these things as a joke and” — she put a size 16 hook in the vise and began winding cream-colored thread on it, almost too quickly to watch — “saved them for me as a kind of gesture of friendship. It got more and more obsessive with him until it became an icky form of intimacy. I tried to agree with him. But he just never seemed to feel I was quite negative enough about proclaiming the awfulness of everything.”

Holly rubbed beeswax onto the thread, then spun pale yellow
fur onto it; she wound the thread on the hook until it looked like the eggy, delicate body of a bug. “I had to meet with him every week, but we couldn’t really talk about my work because the stupidity of the American people was becoming so ominous to him that he was paralyzed, and it was starting to paralyze me. Finally, about two weeks ago, I went into his office determined to take a course on the French Revolution even though I hadn’t had the prerequisite, and he said, ‘Do you know how many books the average American reads between graduation from high school and death?’ And I said no and that I really didn’t care because it was not in my plans to become an average American. But I could see he was in this vortex. He said, ‘Guess!’ I mean, he sort of croaked it out. I refused to guess. He stuck his arms straight out from his body and made little fists. His face was red. ‘Guess!’ When I backed out of his office for the last time, he was shouting, ‘Statistically less than one! Statistically less than one!’ So I got a new adviser.”

Holly set two minute white feathers on top of the hook and figure-eighted the thread around them until they stood up.

“Who is the new one?”

“A very quiet, very pleasant dwarf with a Ph.D. from Harvard.”

“Are you calling him a dwarf because he went to Harvard?”

“I’m calling him a dwarf because he’s four feet high.”

“Oh. Did you get the course?”

“Yep, Dad, yep I did.” Holly wound the hackle around the hook shank and the hackle points spun like a bright little cloud around the base of the wings. She wound the thread to the front of the hook and tied it off in a precise whip finish to make the head of the fly. She opened the bottle of lacquer and, when its good smell came out, looked over at Frank and smiled. She dipped the end of her bodkin in it and touched a clear drop of lacquer to the head of the fly. It gleamed for a second and soaked in. She took the fly out of the vise and put in another hook and started again on an identical fly.

“I was kind of surprised when you told me you were going to come back after graduation.”

“It’s home.”

“I know, but it’s not a place of much opportunity for people your age.”

“Think of the places that are.”

“That’s true.”

“I might even reopen Amazing Grease.”

“Please.”

“Well, I might.”

Frank watched while Holly finished another fly. She used to tie flies for the anglers’ shop, for spending money in high school. She had always fished with Frank. When she was in practice, she could outfish him. She couldn’t cast as far but she was a great water reader and better at stealing up on trout and making her casts count. She’d had a boyfriend down in New Mexico who fished; she even brought him up one time. Frank didn’t like him — Miles something or other. He seemed to think his being a fisherman covered everything. He was an avid, excited young man who took the position that he and Frank had known each other for years. It was part of the angling camaraderie. Frank despised him. Later, Miles gave up fishing to work at the Chicago Board of Trade, where he became a drug addict and dropped from sight. Holly put in another hook and wound the thread onto it.

“Where’ve you been fishing lately?” Frank asked.

“I haven’t been. I made a couple of trips to the Tobacco River, mostly to get away from school for a bit. It’s nice, small stream, a lot of small fish. Come up and I’ll take you.”

Frank was glad she was coming home, though he thought it a bad idea. Holly was a bit high-powered for her old society and her sharp tongue would make it no secret. She was a good-looking girl who did almost nothing on purpose to be attractive. It was hard for Frank to see her falling for one of the up-and-coming young men in town. He didn’t like any of them, found them stylishly callow and opinionated.