Nothing but Blue Skies (23 page)

“Welcome to the human race,” she said. “It’s about welcome.
It’s about accepting your ordinariness. It’s about finding meaning in the everyday.” Frank sensed she was trying to jam in some advice to make this sixty-dollar bum deal seem more palatable. “It’s about letting go, Frank, and sensing a sharing that takes place for those who know what it is to be human.” Frank left her seated at her desk, knowing that when he was out of sight she would pick up his check and that, painful as it might be, it was somehow “about” cashing the check.

And at the same time, he felt poorly. Most everyone he knew was in a program for recovery. He had felt quite isolated by not joining something, had never really felt anything applied to him, but he got the very strong message that he had not tried hard enough. Gracie really wanted him in a program and he would have been willing to meet her halfway, but somehow they got lost in all the choices, all the initials. Now, in his first skirmish and probably his last, he had failed. It was better to have never tried at all than to have failed a program so abruptly. It was as bad as feeling all right, when it seemed to be plain to everyone that this was a sign of his detachment from his true inner feelings. It was like flunking life. The dialogue dropped away and even his considerate and hopeful fibs about “the child within” sagged pitifully. He felt like some bogus stoop who didn’t actually have a child within. Certainly, Edward Ballantine had one, even as big and hairy as he was. That might have accelerated Gracie’s departure.

Instead of going to his appointment with the therapist, a new one named Bob, Frank drove back toward town, went into the Long Haul Saloon and had a glass of draft beer. He used the pay phone to call the receptionist and cancel his appointment. He told her that he had “this thing that’s been going around.” When he went back outside, squinting into the sunshine, he found the police preparing to tow the station wagon and was impressed by their efficiency in locating the vehicle. He walked over to Powell Street, bought the paper and caught a westbound bus with but three people aboard. Two were girls who seemed to be sisters in their early teens, with similar bangs and anachronistic pageboy haircuts
that looked homemade — country girls who averted their eyes, looked at each other and smothered grins by burying their chins on their chests. The other passenger was a trucker with a four-day beard, leather vest and chrome chain leading to his back pocket.

Riding back toward home, with no obligation for guiding the vehicle, sitting with strangers, he savored the anonymity and wondered if the mild euphoria was based on simple movement or avoided responsibility. On the other hand, what was his responsibility? He was eating, he was clothed, he was out of the rain. He was making his way to the edge of the flat earth. He wasn’t as driven as the people who, to protect their own product, circulated the rumor that Corona beer contained dog urine, nor the New York soft-drink interests who claimed Tropical Fantasy soda pop was manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contained ingredients for sterilizing black males. Air Sununu was grounded. And the art market was in a recession. “Unlike stocks and bonds, many works of art are unique,” said the
Wall Street Journal
. And in the wake of a Royal Dutch/Shell Group refinery fire, the price of crude was up while pork bellies settled sharply. Constant busyness out there, no time to think, but the four of us on this bus are lost in our thoughts, our fortunes turned over to the man in gray up front there at the wheel who drives us but never indicates his intentions. Frank allowed his gaze to settle on the driver, feeling despair at the smooth movement of his hands on the wheel.

Summer was beginning and Crest would be available in a new dispenser that sucked unused toothpaste back into the container when the customer stopped squeezing. It really looked like it would be a beautiful summer. Queen Elizabeth II planned to attend her first baseball game and might try a hot dog, though it was made clear that she could distance herself from the hot dog, since in British tradition the queen cannot express private views.

Even though his doctors abandoned his building without warning and with a month’s rent unpaid, Frank at first avoided thinking about it at all. But when he drove past and found the lights off and a youngster practicing wheel stands on his bicycle in the sprinkler-softened ground, he felt that the clinic needed to be taken care of and carefully rerented and managed. He pined for video games with the blubber-thick crack addicts of the Far North. Those knife-wielding Eskimos would have made short work of these rent-dodging white boys. He was slow to face the implications of the emptying of his clinic. It was, as they say, a highly leveraged transaction in the first place.

If the prospects of failure had crept toward him from the day Gracie left, they were now at a full gallop. He quickly reckoned whether he could slow this down. He was conscious of a kind of force bearing against him. He drove toward home but then stopped
in front of his office. He got out and looked around as though checking the address. The wind up the street frightened him. It seemed like the movie wind that blows away footprints.

Two cattle buyers from Nebraska were in his office, smelling of the lots and the diesel fuel of the outbound loads, with snap-button cotton shirts, Copenhagen lumps under their lower lips and Stetson Open Road hats pulled just over the tops of their eyes. The older of the two wore eyeglasses with colorless frames. He had buck teeth and looked like he never smiled in his life, not once. His counterpart had a round chipmunky face and eager brown eyes.

Frank started out by denying everything. He spoke with a booming voice he used only around cattle buyers. His mind quietly ran on in several directions, one of which was that the bank, noticing poor crop-growing conditions and consequent low feeder replacements, was desperately trying to keep themselves, and Frank, from taking a bad blow. The bank must have alerted these boys. Force him to take the loss now and suck it out of his other collateral. The wind was blowing away his footprints.

“What do you mean, I stole those cattle?” Frank boomed.

“I don’t mean literally stole,” said the older man.

“I paid about what their owners wanted for them,” shouted Frank in a voice that would have been unfamiliar to his own mother. “But I sure picked my time and I bought them right. If you want yearlings, that’s one thing. But I don’t allow folks to discuss valuation with me at that level. Now I know where these are going and I know what feed is. I can background them till hell freezes over, you know that. But I have told you like a white man what I’ve got to have and the two of you look at me like a pair of Chinamen. You tell me that not only have I stolen these cattle in the first place but that I am not entitled to fair market value for them. Which is: eighty-four cents a hundredweight with a nickel slide at, what, six hundred pounds?”

“Five seventy-five slide,” said the younger man.

Frank shrugged. He minced over to another spot in the room in a golden fatigue. Even he could feel a sort of doom. At least these
fellows weren’t rubbing his nose in it. A pleasant, protective code was in the air.

“Five seventy-five,” Frank repeated.

Part of the formula, which comforted everyone in a cattle deal, was to lose deal points without losing face. This price slide really knocked the wind out of Frank, but he didn’t let it show. His mind was moving fast. He knew he wanted to be out from under these cattle, but this thing on the slide was a fucking double hernia. He was in too good a mood when he bought them, and lately he had quit tracking them in the marketplace, a loss of interest that could get costly if it went much beyond this. With the doctors out of his building, the bank was surely wondering about him. It was time for the parachute before the USDA issued one of its devastating inventory reports or some bullshit about lighter cattle going on feed, various ruinous allegations about seasonal erosion of fed cattle marketings. He used to track this sort of thing like radar, but with Gracie gone he had begun to notice that often he just didn’t know. He didn’t really know now, but he had the urge to take flight, to bolt.

“I guess we could write you a deposit,” said the man in the glasses.

“No, I don’t expect you could,” Frank said, trying not to get in a rush, trying not to spill, trying not to let on that this was something he wanted out of now. He wanted to get this thing down to the bone. They had to know he was hurting.

“Mister, we’re a good ways from home.”

“Yeah,” said Frank, “this one I’ve also heard. You don’t dare show your face without ten pots of yearlings. You can’t even go up to the house without a thousand head because of what people expect of you in the Sand Hills.” He thought this would warm things up toward a closure, and he was right.

The older man said, “They expect quite a little, don’t deny that.”

“If you’re shipping as quick as you say, I need to show this stock paid in full. Get out your checkbook and start writing.” Frank was really saying, Don’t tell me you can’t write me a great big check for these cattle, I know you’re plenty stout.

The older man slid his eyes to his companion, moved his chin very slightly. They were going to leave Frank his shred of dignity. It wasn’t costing them anything. The round-faced younger man reached under his coat without looking and elevated his checkbook from his shirt pocket.

“I used to know a man who wrote checks for a million dollars,” Frank said, “then lit his cigar with them. Can you tell me who I can call to verify the funds?”

Frank was back out of the cattle business again. If the check didn’t bounce, he could go to the bank and tell them that although they just lost fifty thousand dollars, it could have been way worse, blah blah blah. No surprise to them. Changing times, like an ice water enema. They sent these guys. They knew there was a loss. It was just a question of how bad a one a man could take. That evening, as he walked home from the office, he made his way over to Endrin Street, to the small storefront building he owned there, the former locale of Gracie’s restaurant Amazing Grease, a modest institution she referred to as a “bio-feedbag mechanism.” The very recollection of this phrase reminded Frank bitterly of the witless companionship he had enjoyed since. No, that was ungrateful; but it didn’t give him anything like the same feeling, to say the least.

He let himself in and sat at one of the six tables. He looked around, taking things in by the light that came through the front window, past the small counter and the doorway to the kitchen. Next to the kitchen doorway, the blackboard still hung and he was able to make out a few words. He got up and went closer, peering at it. It said “Crawfish Etouffée” and it was written in Gracie’s hand in that powdery, fragile chalk script. He sat down at the table again and looked out through the window into the declining light of day.

He had a sharp feeling that he had lost his touch, a feeling that once the slide reached a certain speed, it couldn’t be stopped until it reached the bottom. He felt a chill. “Gracie,” he said aloud, perfectly aware that it was not a great thing to begin talking to yourself. “I think I’m going broke.”

This feeling stayed with him so long that it was not exactly a surprise when his accountant asked to see him. John Coleman was one of the most reputable accountants in the city and Frank enjoyed going to his office for a sense of the pulse, a cool office with muted traffic sounds below and an undisturbed air. He showed Frank a chair, then swung sideways in his own after asking his secretary to hold his calls. He always gave Frank the feeling that he had set aside more time than they would ever need. “Are you all right?” he asked. John still wore wide, soft ties restrained in the middle by a tie clasp with a little chain.

“I’m fine.”

“You haven’t been by.”

“Not much happening. It takes almost a year to absorb the blow of last year’s taxes.”

“You’re a success, Frank. It’s expensive to be a success.” Coleman wrapped his hand around his forehead.

“In more ways than one.”

“Quite right. It’s either too much or too little, isn’t it? I mostly see too little. But Frank, you’ve always had a nice light touch, a nice feel for the situation.”

“John, I appreciate the valentines. What’s up?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I think I see problems.”

“Are you talking about my cattle deal?”

“Partly.”

“I’ll tell you what that was. That was a bum deal and we all have them.”

“The clinic?”

“That was a case of drawing the line. Where’d those assholes go, anyway?”

John said in the tone of an elementary schoolteacher, “They went elsewhere. They went to the new clinic.” He pursed his lips, raised and lowered his eyebrows.

“There’s a new clinic?”

“Out near Nineteenth.”

“Oh. I thought that was a day care.”

“See, Frank? You would have known that before.”

“Anyway, we’ll fill the building.”

“You will.”

“I believe so.”

John laced his fingers over the top of his head and looked straight at Frank. Frank thought it was a rather artificial gesture. He asked, “What about Gracie?”

“What about her?”

“Hear anything?”

“Nope.”

“She divorce you yet?”

“Not yet. I don’t really care. I guess she’ll get around to it. I couldn’t give a shit less.”

“I’m just trying to imagine its impact on your finances.”

“I guess she’ll take me to the cleaners.” Frank yawned. “Little coaching from the boyfriend, they’ll see a big future. Takes money. Might want to make a hit in Sedona. Oak Creek Canyon. Strong showing in Scottsdale. I’m having trouble with the future. It’s my least favorite tense.”

“Frank, I’m your accountant. Are you saying you don’t care?”

“No, I’m saying my focus is elsewhere.” He wanted to get up.
“Do what you can, John. I’m not much help just now.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Yeah, yeah I do.”

“What is it?”

“I’m gonna drive around. Take in the sights.”