Nothing but Blue Skies (9 page)

“Okay, where?” she said in a lusterless voice that suggested she was on to his game but would meet him partway. The absurdity of having gotten into this with dog biscuits must have struck her by now, or it would soon.

He gave her his address and set the time at seven o’clock, a nice hour close to the crossroads between dining and tomfoolery. He hung up the phone and could have gasped with relief but for the helpless smile that spread across his face.

Joanie was on time. By some rude standards, she was not presentable. She was a hearty, open-faced country girl, big enough to play for the Steelers. Frank told her right off that Scott was dead, but she came straight in and looked around his house as though she were the most unimpeachable ticket holder in a public place of amusement. Frank then decided he would cook for her, an impulse he had but seldom. After dinner, he promised, they would walk around the neighborhood and distribute the dog biscuits. She beamed at these suggestions, pulled things from the shelves for examination.

Frank established Joanie on the comfortable sofa in front of the television. She made it even more comfortable by propping herself all around with pillows, removing her shoes and putting her legs up. She seemed to be in for the long haul. He gave her the channel changer and she made immediately for the baseball game. While Frank chopped and prepared, she called out key events in the game, the Indians and the Tigers, and at one point burst into such raucous laughter that Frank went in for a look: a Detroit player was shoving an umpire backward across the infield. Frank returned to his cooking, stir-frying chicken and raw peanuts, thinking about how welcome these coarse shouts from the living room were, when the doorbell rang. He took the wok off the flame and answered it. It was Lucy.

Frank said, “Um.”

“Is this a bad time?” she asked, peering into the hallway.

“Not at all,” said Frank, backing inward and gesturing toward the living room with his spatula. “Please come in and introduce yourself to my guest —” Frank didn’t know Joanie’s last name. “And be so kind as to join us for dinner.”

“Oh, I —”

“Of course you can. I know your habits.”

“What the heck.” Lucy came into the house in a cloud of jasmine perfume and by the time Frank heard her speaking to Joanie in the living room, he was back in the kitchen. Frank wondered what Lucy’s reflections were as to her spot on the totem pole of desire when she found this cheerful elephant on the sofa. He could hear the game and the conversation from the living room and was reminded how pleasant plain human noise could be.

This time when the doorbell rang it was June, straight from the car lot in the sensible suit she’d worn at breakfast. “You’re just in time for dinner,” said Frank without an invitation or explanation. He shooed June into the living room and went back to the kitchen to chop every fryable thing in the refrigerator. June knew where the bar was, and wanton cackling soon poured from the living room. It’s a shame I had to show up, Frank thought. He now had so much food in the wok it was hard to turn it over with the spatula and keep the bottom from burning.

“Anybody gonna help?” he called.

“No!” June said.

He ground up Szechuan peppers with the butt of the cleaver handle and sprinkled them into the cooking food. He tried it and added garlic, then rice wine vinegar. It was getting there. He opened the refrigerator with the toe of his shoe and looked for beer: there was plenty, and the food was going to be hot.

“Come and get it or I’ll throw it out!” While the women came from the next room, he piled bowls and utensils, placed the six-packs of beer on the table in their holders, shoved the soy sauce and other condiments to the center and set the wok on a pot holder. They swept into the room with an audible rush and sat down. Frank rubbed his hands and said, “New blood.”

“You wish,” said June. “They’re bad,” she said to the other women.

“It’s never new enough for these butterflies as they float from flower to flower,” Lucy said.

Frank was always surprised by the capacity of women for a kind of clubbiness with one another. These three already seemed to be old friends. Men would still have been eyeing each other’s shoes and watches, listening for accents.

“What do you think of this, Joanie?” Frank asked her.

Joanie looked rural and lost for just a moment, then focused on the food. “What is it?”

“Gallatin County Thousand Sighs Resfriados.”

“Oh.”

Frank dished out the food. It was like summer camp. The women were artificially elated, and the energy of unexpressed wit seemed to fill the room.

Joanie took one last doubtful look at her food and said, “Over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes!”

Frank quaffed a beer to catch up. June told about a customer who constantly complained about his Buick, coming to the agency to gripe about mysterious noises. Today, she finally gathered a group of mechanics and sales people and placed the complaining customer, a circuit court judge, in the middle and asked him to imitate the sound his Buick was making in the hopes one of them would know what it was. The judge made a series of whining chugs — which June tried to render — followed by a low whistle, repeated them five times for his appreciative audience, only to have June tell him, “We’ll have to get back to you on this.” Wild laughter filled the dining room. The immense Joanie rose to a semi-crouch and popped four beers. “More beer for my lieutenants,” she said, astonishing every sweating face around the table as she passed them out. June filled her mouth with stir-fry, widened her eyes and said, “Shit fire!” Lucy quietly slid her hand up the inside of Frank’s thigh and Joanie shouted, “Drop his dick, lady, you’re busted.” The gaping faces stared around giddily.

“What a dinner party!” Frank yelled, surprised at the volume
of his own voice. He looked across at Joanie’s beef red slab of a face and wondered what would come out of it next.

“Guess who stood outside my window watching me undress last month?”

“Who?”

Lucy jabbed her thumb sideways in Frank’s direction. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, kept chewing. This wasn’t real insouciance.

“Oh, Frank,” crooned June. It was hard to tell whether or not she was disapproving.

“So what did you do,” Joanie asked, “call 911?”

“I sent him to the Arctic Circle,” Lucy said. She looked around at the bewildered faces and added, “I’m a travel agent.” It didn’t seem to clear up much, but she didn’t enlarge on it and “Arctic Circle” was absorbed as some sort of expression, descriptive of a deplorable state reached in many modern relationships.

It was here that Frank thought he would try to explain. He would tell them about the sense of freedom he had prowling around in the middle of the night, the sense of surprise, but Joanie jumped in to call, “Curiosity killed the cat,” and raised her arms like a choirmaster as the others cheered, “Satisfaction brought him back!”

“I was trying to get to the bottom of things,” he said, and got booed. He opened another beer and pushed his bowl away from himself. The others did the same. It was like a women’s locker room and he was the towel boy. Lucy belched without self-consciousness and looked off in thought.

“We should count our blessings,” she said with faint gloom, “that we haven’t arrived at the moon of the cruise and package tours.”

“What’s this all about?” June asked, rifling her purse until she found a lipstick. She screwed it up into her view, squinted and began applying it to her lips. Frank knew June as someone who deplored all avoidable melancholy.

“I mean, my company should be called Last Fling Tours. I don’t know if I want to work there anymore. It’s sort of depressing.”

“That people get old?” June asked. “I can’t wait to get old. I thank God I’m not a day under forty-one.”

“No, that they should do all this catching up at the end. Do you have any idea the quantity of adult diapers a cruise ship carries?”

“Oh, Lucy, come on.”

“I’m serious.”

“I think it’s touching,” said Joanie, “and if the ship goes down, it makes a kind of romantic ending.” Frank missed Joanie’s point, seeing only diapers bobbing on an empty sea.

June said, “I suppose we could take this view of everything. Every silver lining has a cloud. You guys think everything is a tearjerker. I sell convertibles to some very desperate people. I’m just sorry there’s not more of them. I’d have me a big rolling ranch outside of town like the cook here. Walking horses. Hounds. Yeah, that’s right. Y’all come. Sayonara ragtops.”

“You don’t want a ranch, June,” Frank said. “Or if you do, I’ll sell you mine.”

“You can’t sell it,” said June. “It’s the old family place.”

“Watch me.”

“Ever since I first met you, you’ve been wanting to get rid of it. Why’s this?”

“None of us live out there and it’s hard to keep it going, keep the weeds down, keep it irrigated, keep it fenced. You can’t find ranch hands. If they’re easy to get along with, they don’t work, and vice versa. I just fired one today. I hated it. Hard worker. I shouldn’t hire people because I can’t stand to fire anybody. This was a little different. He got me off the hook by insulting me. So, at first I was comfortable about letting him go. Now I’m unhappy again. I called his wife. She was literally savage to me, but it didn’t cure anything. I wish I knew how they were getting through this evening. He’s going to be job hunting tomorrow. But he and his wife are a pair of mean Joses.”

The women sat patiently through this maundering, then Joanie said, “Let’s go out there and look in their window and see how they’re getting along!” Frank shook his head, but June and Lucy shouted their support for the idea. Frank raised his hands to bring this to a stop but it had the opposite effect. He went into the
kitchen to start coffee. Things were spinning along too fast. When he got back to the table they were deep into their plan of spying on the Jarrells. “What’s to become of this cowboy couple?” asked June. “Enquiring minds want to know.”

“You got any fucking brandy?” asked Joanie. “Schnapps?”

Frank doggedly hauled out the brandy, a pretty good cognac. They tossed it back without ceremony. They drank coffee too, which ought to have helped. He held out for a while but they got Jarrell’s name and conferred over the telephone book. “Here it is, and it’s a perfect address,” said Joanie with her finger on a page. “All cottonwoods along a creek. We can sneak around in there like real Indians.” Frank had a shot of brandy. This was going to be both exhilarating and mildly dangerous: the disconsolate Jarrells could come out blazing.

First, the dog biscuits had to be distributed.

“Let’s go down Tracy,” said Frank. “There’s a mutt every ten feet on Tracy. Let’s go down Tracy.”

Frank carried the dog biscuits as they walked along the array of lawns. Lights shone from the painted porches. Schoolchildren studied in lighted upper windows, and where they passed dark houses, the cool stars glowed close overhead. At each stretch of chain-link fence, a dog bounded out and received a dog biscuit. The starlight glowed on the roofs of automobiles along the curb and there was a faint murmur of radio and television, music and typing, the hollow tap of Ping-Pong. In a basement workshop a bandsaw sang. The air was full of the breath of cooling silver maples and effulgent spruces. The four walked in peculiar contentment and a feeling of rightness, afloat. On every side, life went on.

“I hate to break the spell,” said Joanie, “but I’d like to see how the couple is getting along.”

The idea teetered here on the edge of collapse. There was a quiet moment when the right words seemed out of reach, time enough for Joanie to say, “On your mark, get set —” and start the hysteria up again and a stampede for the cars. A relay of barking dogs marked their progress down the street.

By walking the creek bottom through the sparsely settled neighborhood, single file, they approached the small, run-down house of Boyd Jarrell. The muddy banks of the creek made a coarse sucking sound around their shoes as they walked. By the time they got close, hunkered down in the red willows and startling clouds of red-winged blackbirds, only Frank still had shoes on, and that was because his laced up. The others had lost theirs in the mud. Their legs were black almost to their knees, and those who had tried to retrieve their shoes, Lucy and June, had black arms. Frank tried over and over again to get them to be quiet, but they chattered away and laughed through their noses when he signaled at them with downward cuts of his right arm and mimed the words “Keep it down!” When they were close, he stopped and said in a low anchorman voice, “If he hears us, he might start shooting.” He got perfect silence.

A bank of untended lilacs enclosed a small back yard with a picnic table that had built-in bench seats on either side, a burn barrel, a clothesline, a swing set (Does he have kids? Frank wondered. How can I not know if he has kids?), a barbecue with a red enamel lid and a crooked little crabapple tree still in blossom. An open lighted window faced into this yard and there was a table
just inside the window at which sat Boyd Jarrell, apparently asleep with his head on his arms.

They managed to slip through the lilacs quietly and Frank whispered his plan for them to sit at the picnic table and observe. They didn’t quite understand, so he went forward and sat on one end of the bench seat facing the house. He gestured for the others to follow. June came and sat next to him, then Joanie. Finally, Lucy came and sat. It was her relatively light extra weight that caused the picnic table to flip over on top of them. Frank felt the wood press his face and heard June’s hissing Okie curses. Joanie was on all fours, bucking, trying to get it off all of them in one powerful gesture but then complained she had gotten splinters in her rump. Frank grasped the table and raised the whole thing back into place with a red face. Lucy remained sitting on the ground, cross-legged, muttering, “I just hate it.” Frank’s first concern was Jarrell, but he saw his position hadn’t moved. They sat again at the table, two on each side.

Then they watched.

“Is he asleep?”