Nothing but Blue Skies (38 page)

“I’m not saying it’s a way to cut costs in a relationship.”

“My wife and I don’t have that kind of money,” Phil said. “We’re old-fashioned. We’d just like to kill each other.”

“The last time I felt really close to Gracie, well, we were going to open a burger joint, something different, something with a slogan, and what it was going to be about was volume sales. I was just thinking numbers. But Gracie, who’s a great cook, thinks whatever you do should be good for the world, whereas I just like business. And I honestly mean it when I say that when Amazing Grease went upside down I didn’t gloat because she did serve really distinctive food while it lasted. And it was like anything she did for good reasons was doomed and anything I do for my usual money-grubbing motives would succeed. It was really humiliating to Gracie. We never actually said it. It was like her view of life was nowhere because she couldn’t face what a paltry, hopeless deal it was and I could. But the funny thing is, since she withdrew in defeat and just let the lesson speak for itself, I haven’t been able to do as well either. Or I don’t want to. Or I fail to see what it means. Or, whatever.”

Phil wore a pinched, inward look. He had both hands around his drink. He seemed to be watching something inside himself. He lifted the drink up and finished it. “I gotta go,” he said.

“Phil, is everything okay?”

Phil was up and next to the door. “I really can’t answer that question.”

Frank knew better than to follow him out the door. Instead, he brought the television in so he could see it while he ate. The Broncos. Elway goes back, back, uncorks a Hail Mary … incomplete. He finished his drink and made one more because he could just begin to feel that good old mellow feeling: the coexistence of life’s elements as so successfully seen through the bottom of a glass. He smiled at the wholesome chili. He thought with sweet sadness of his pain and Phil’s pain, all the while knowing they were learning something important. He forgot the overpowering sense that nothing is learned, that this is a circle and a headache in which the nerves of the abdomen are counterweighted by the capacity for remorse. For example, he contemplated with a faint, annunciatory smile the idea that nothing really was important.

The wind had swung around to the northwest and the bright summer clouds were replaced by the slanting, lead-shot systems of somewhere over the Divide. It was still warm, but for the first time they were getting other people’s weather. Frank wondered if he was imagining a bustling, slightly worried quality of people in the street. For his own part, he craved to be out in the country.

He might only have wished to escape. The bank had begun proceedings against him and had suggested that he might “opt for the quiet alternative” and hand over several things that they had identified, including his house. The house’s value increased suddenly to him. It had belonged to his grandfather. His father had sold it and Frank bought it back twenty years later. In the meanwhile, it had become a duplex. Frank and Gracie converted it back into a single-family home and raised Holly in its multiplicity of steam-heated rooms. The old house had seen some unhappy moments, but Frank thought there was a chance that things would change, and he still wanted to hang on to it in case they did. He did not necessarily hope that he and Gracie would get back together but that he would find some accommodation with his situation and that would approximate happiness, or absorption in something, maybe a renewed absorption in business. But the bank going after his home affected him viscerally.

His success had once consisted in an ability to mix himself in the throng wholeheartedly while maintaining a kind of detachment that told him what the general currents were in what seemed to be pure Brownian movement. For example, he long knew where people were getting ready to move to. When they got there, they’d find he owned much of the land and would have to buy it from him. He had built the clinic before there were enough doctors to fill it. They were still coming to ski or fish from their homes and practices in Texas, California and New York. He knew they were getting ready to move; they didn’t. As people relatively exalted in their own minds, they resented his having foreseen this. A few tried renting offices or practicing out of private dwellings. It didn’t last. They ended up renting from him.

Something about professionals made Frank enjoy gouging them, a quality in himself that explained the popularity of people like Lane Lawlor. It was interesting to see what it would take to get the doctors to band together and build their own clinic. Now the bastards were gone. Still, it was zoned light industrial over there. He was thinking of moving a little electronics thing in from its dismal headquarters in Three Forks; they made position-indicating radio beacons to be worn by skiers in avalanche areas, a little like the one worn by that poor old wolf. It was a good product, but he just didn’t care right now. He had no idea where people were headed or what they wanted. He was like a hawk that was losing its eyesight.

He tried an experimental weekend at the ranch. He fully expected to find ghosts there, of his family and himself; but what he found was that it was empty except for Boyd Jarrell, who was back at his old job. Boyd actually waved to him, though it was a dismissive wave, as he dragged a set of tractor chains from the barn. Everything was familiar but it was without any further resonance. He could locate, room by room, scenes of important early events, but they not only failed to enhance those memories, they reduced them. The room off the kitchen with the ironing board mounted to the wall, where his father had had his first heart attack, was just a cold, empty room. It seemed insufficiently
inviting to accommodate a heart attack. The front room, where as a family they had watched Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, failed to bring back memories. To Frank’s dismay, it only brought back memories of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

The attic contained two Flexible Flyer sleds and the camping equipment that had gotten such complete use. Frank’s father was a skillful packer of horses and the outings with his sons were lessons in diamond hitches and squaw hitches, demonstrations of the driving of a picket pin and of jackknife cookery, mantying gear, Decker versus sawbuck pack saddles and the language of trailblazing. Frank recognized his gratitude now. How much better to recall a parent in action than in statements. In fact, most of the statements Frank remembered from his father, he remembered unhappily. The actions he remembered were among his treasures.

Mike had sold off the timber. He had that right under their partnership agreement: Frank had the grazing, Mike had the timber. Frank had leased his grazing and Mike was now irrevocably cutting down the trees. Through the long weekend, Frank listened to the hot-rod snarl of the chain saws. It took many years for those trees to stand up like that and just a minute to be killed. From the house, Frank could see parts of the bristled surface of forest above the ranch folded over flat. He could hear the skidder making its terrible sound in the living trees and he could see smoke from the trucks. He could even see the safety orange of the hard hats. More than anything, he heard the doleful howl of the saws in the shattered forest. He knew how the soil would be rent in hauling off the trees and decided to skip that part and go back into town. It was probably time, he thought, for Americans to learn to love pavement with all their hearts.

Tonight, finally, was the Branding, featuring Lane Lawlor. Seven people called and made sure Frank didn’t miss it.

Frank wore the old belted Aquascutum overcoat that had belonged to his father, for the simple reason that he, Frank, was never seen in it. He wore his new Air Jordan high tops and his John Deere billed cap pulled low over his forehead. He was in disguise. He paid his admission to one of the five women seated behind a low folding table and got his hand stamped with the image of a spur. Then he entered the already crowded Earl Butz Kiva, a room that had once filled with the cries and ecstasies of an audience in actual physical sight of the gleaming head of James Watt, who had taken to the lecture trail with the fallen warriors of Watergate and Iran-Contra. Frank thought of an earlier generation, when Billy Sol Estes, born too early, languished in prison instead of traveling the rubber chicken circuit. “All you need is love,” said the Beatles. “Love is all you need.”

This was a high-spirited crowd, though. People stood up in their seats to call across to neighbors. There were hundreds of cowboy hats and gimme caps like Frank’s that formed a rich carpet sweeping toward the stage. Frank knew many hardworking ranchers and farmers, but he saw none of them tonight. Overhead projected a steel frame that suspended the lights for the
stage, empty now except for a piano and a standing microphone before the curtain. For almost twenty minutes, nothing happened except people looking for their seats. Frank surmised that some subtle change in the lights, some infinitesimal fading or brightening, which caused rock-and-roll audiences to explode like plankton, must have occurred because the audience began to stamp its feet and shout. The noise increased like a volcano. Frank felt fear, felt it in gusts as something rolled over him that he did not quite understand. Could these people really be from around here?

The slit in the curtain opened as in giving birth, and out trotted not only Lane Lawlor but Frank’s own child Holly. She twirled in her white cowgirl boots and ten-gallon hat. A roar went forth from the audience. Frank had no idea Lane was so popular. Where have I been? he asked himself as the crowd around him began to flow upward into a standing ovation. Frank stood too. He didn’t have the nerve to leave his arms at his sides. Instead, he raised his hands and held them, palms in proximity as if clapping. Lane patted the air in downward motions of his arms to ask shyly for quiet. The fact that he was a big clumsy man seemed to help him. For a moment the audience was having none of it. They defied his request and cheered louder. He let his arms hang at his sides and dropped his chin modestly. At length, the noise subsided and everyone settled into their chairs. Holly darted everywhere, keeping the energy high. To Frank, she seemed to be having a fit.

As Lane moved to the microphone and made a few practiced adjustments, Holly softly played “The Streets of Laredo” behind him on the piano. She faded out as he began to speak. Very quietly he said, “Montana is not a zoo.” The audience boomed its response. Frank looked around in alarm. One large man behind him was pulling his mouth apart by the corners and emitting a terrifying whistle. There were numerous gimme caps flung into the air, though as of yet none of the more expensive cowboy hats.

About six rows over, Frank spotted Sheriff Hykema. Lane muttered away as if talking to himself, about how it was not our obligation to provide comfortable housing for animals that had lost the talent for survival in our modern world. “Hey,” he said,
“if you can’t hack it, here’s the door!” This produced general, respectful applause. Then Lane stepped back from the microphone and, profiling himself to the audience, tossed his head back and howled like a wolf. They knew what he meant by that! A roar of laughter blended imperceptibly with more applause. “Fern-feelin’ prairie fairies gonna getcha!” he said, then joined their good-natured laughter, tried to get serious and dropped his forehead to the microphone helplessly. He lifted his head and aimed his mouth at the ceiling and called out, “God, can you tell me, ’cause no one down here can: why do these out-of-staters want us to have a system in Montana
which has failed in Russia?
” The pandemonium produced by this question was slow in subsiding. “And as far as the federal government goes, there’s more gunfire in a Washington, D.C., playground on a good day than there was in a month in Dodge City in eighteen hunnert and seventy-five!”

“Yeah!” they shouted back at him.

“Read your history!”

“Yeah!”

“Listen to your conscience!”

“Yeah!”

“Let me make it simple for them sonsofbitches: we’re the
good
people; they’re the
bad
people!”

“That’s right!”

“I wanta tell you. The cold, cool waters of the West are flowing from her wounds. They are leaving Montana while I’m talking to you. What wouldn’t I give to dam the smallest one, that creek a little child jumps across. If you are unlucky enough to run into someone who wants those rivers flowing elsewhere”— here Lane took a suspenseful pause —“gut-shoot them at the border.” A roar went up. Holly struck thunderous chords on the piano. “Gut-shoot them at the border!” Another roar, another howl from the piano.
“Gut-shoot them at the border!”

Some crazed-looking woman was climbing up over the front of the stage. She struggled to her feet. “Hey, lady, the evening is still young,” Lane sang into the PA system. He inverted his palms near his face like Jack Benny. The audience laughed out a kind of
encouragement. The crazy woman staggered for balance across the stage while Lane backed away in mock terror. Then Frank saw: it was Gracie! Was she in on this too? Gracie strode across the stage to the piano and yanked Holly to her feet. A sound from the indignant crowd swept forward.

Frank stood up. Holly was struggling with her mother under the cones of light from the overhead grid. Lane was doing a ringside commentary: “You’ve got to choose sometime, Holly … Folks, I’d like you to meet Gracie Copenhaver, owner-operator of the now defunct left-wing hot-tubbers’ hangout Amazing Grease. Remember, the Constitution guarantees your rights even when a parent tries to abrogate them. Folks, what’s happening to my piano player? Looks like Mama’s in a world of hurt. You call that an excuse? Holly, you’re younger and stronger. You have the Bill of Rights on your side! You have the Fifth Amendment! Don’t let your mother drag you down into the kind of life she has created for herself!”

Frank was on his feet, shoving people out from in front of him. One rancher seized his arm and Frank knocked it loose, hard. He climbed up and over the stage’s apron, gripping the nonskid carpeting on the stage, the shadow of the microphone across his back. As soon as he had his feet under him, he dove straight into the middle of Lane Lawlor, pummeling him as they went down. The sound from the crowd was like that from a provoked animal. It rolled over Frank like a gust or an ocean wave. That was all he saw. In the flooding darkness, he remembered the long-ago trip to Utah when he’d argued with Gracie and Holly played dead in the pool. They were together again. “Holly!” he called into the mountain of denim. “Gracie!”