The Bushwacked Piano (10 page)

She felt at one with things.

She felt as if, plumb tuckered, she had blown her wad. She knew that inside her box was an undeveloped image awaiting the bath of real chemicals. Her mind and heart rang with these volleys of zickers. Her step was springy. And her desirable little ass was tight and peach-cleft with girlish go. Aristotle says Eudemonia, she thought.

LAUREL, MONTANA
FRIENDLY CHURCHES
COME
SEE
US

It won’t be long now, thought Clovis. Billings was behind at last. To the immediate right of the controls was the television. Clovis had turned it on and was watching The Dating Game. An attractive adolescent girl had just won two weeks in Reno with a glandular Chief Petty Officer. She had picked him because his voice reminded her of Neil Sedaka. But when he came out from behind the curtain, the girl was agog.

The summer mountains were the color of cougars. In the foreground, a flippant Burma-Shave antagonism manifested itself. Horses stood in the shade of larger signs and switched. Clovis was thinking of Payne’s youthful power. It won’t be long now, he reminded himself.

Is this fair, Payne asked himself, is it? He looked out of the window of the Big Horn cafe. There was a crowd in the street watching the wreckage of the fire: cowboys, loggers, businessmen, a camel. A young schoolteacher was having lunch with a promising student. “Once you get the drop on Shakespeare,” the teacher said, “you’ve got the whole deal licked.” The mayor arrived outside.

A wrecking ball came through a half-burned building, an old mortician’s shop, raining pieces of unfinished headstone, tongue and groove siding, bird and mouse nests. A small group had formed around the mayor who gestured toward the fire damage with one upraised palm. “We’re gonna prettify this son of a bitch or die trying,” he assured his constituency.

“I don’t like my work,” Payne told an elderly waitress.

“Never mind that,” she said. “Have a bromo, honey.”

“I’m unhappy with my lot,” he told her.

Ann wasn’t small. She was delicately made though and long rather than particularly slender though she was slender too; but what impressed you about her hands, nose and feet was their length and the paleness of her skin. Her eyes seemed very fully open, the upper lid nearly invisible and the lower seeming pared away to a sliver, though without the usual quality of staring. When she smoked, she handled a cigarette with careless precision and could leave a cigarette in her mouth, breathing and squinting through the smoke, and look rather beautiful doing it. She listened attentively even to Wayne Codd who had decided that, after the honeymoon in Paris, they would just constantly be going to operas.

On that appointed day, Payne watched Main Street from the crack of dawn. And at the crack of dusk, the great Dodge appeared, blocking the end of North Main and browsing up the center line with the head of the immortal fatty craning around the inside.

Payne jumped up from his seat in front of the Peterson Dewing building and ran alongside the vehicle. They shook hands through its window and Payne rode on its step while Clovis hunted a forty-foot parking spot.

They camped that night on Bangtail Creek, leaving the Dodge behemoth on the highway. They schemed like Arabs until the morning and rose at first light. Payne built a fire in a small wheelbarrow he found; and in the morning chill, they moved the wheelbarrow around to keep in the sun. They warmed their hands and planned it all.

There was time to go over it later; but, perhaps, Payne
began to see as he had not seen before that in certain important ways his own life, like Clovis’, was not funny; or only limitedly so, like cakewalking into a barrage; or better, one of Clovis’ horrific signs, the Uncle Sam, for instance, shriveled, asking for a pick-me-up. Payne’s indirection took him strangely, as though he were coming down with it, feckless flu. The headlong approach of C. J. Clovis made him, in his vigor and arrogance, the stick in the candy apple of America; it filled Payne with the joy of knowing that expressways are inhabited by artful dodgers, highhanded intuitive anarchists who don’t get counted but believe in their vast collective heart that the U.S.A. is a floating crap game of strangling spiritual credit. Write that down.

Clovis saw quite another thing in Payne.

C. J. Clovis stood on a bench in Sacajawea Park at Livingston, Montana, haranguing an audience composed of cranks and drifters not unlike himself, on the subject of bat towers. Bats in Clovis’ description were tiny angels bent on the common weal, who flittered decoratively through the evening sky ridding the atmosphere of the mosquito. Now the mosquito to Clovis was a simple pus-filled syringe with wings. Was that what you wanted your air filled with? If so, never mind bat towers. If not, contact Savonarola Batworks, Incorporated, poste restante, Livingston, Montana.

“Dear Governor Wallace,” wrote Ann to the famous Alabaman. “As an American artist, I would like to offer my condolences for your deceased wife. Rest assured that your darling Lurleen awaits you in Hillbilly Heaven. Sincerely yours, Ann Fitzgerald.” Ann was constantly ready to lace into rednecks and right-wingers.

The clear shadow advanced across the parquet floor of her bedroom. She had been in the room since dawn making marks on the floor, every hour on the hour, numbering
the shadow’s progress to indicate the time. An imperfect plan, she thought, but I’ll always be able to glance at it in August and know
quelle heure est-il
. I never come except in August. She sings “Stars Fell on Alabama” in a quiet, pretty voice. Her attitude toward Governor Wallace begins to soften.

Her thoughts of Payne are sporadic and persistent; there has been a pattern. Thoughts of love upon waking in the morning. Thoughts of deprivation then fulfillment on the great unwobbling pivot just before lunch. In the late afternoon, she often thinks of him with anger. Why does he act like that? In the light of the present household tensions, which are terrifically nonspecific, Montana itself begins to pall and subsequently the West, America and so on. As the features of the world recede, Payne is left high and dry like a shipwreck in a drained reservoir. Ann longs to move longingly among his waterlogged timbers, carrying the key to his sea chest. Angelfish, Beau Gregories, tautogs, lantern fish, sergeant majors, morays, bullheads, barracudas, groupers, tunas, flounders, skates, rays, sea robins, balao and narwhals gasp on waterless decks as Ann runs through Payne’s bulkheads.

Payne walked across the town to the railroad station where he had left the car. The wagon remained at Bangtail Creek; he hoped not very seriously that it hadn’t been vandalized. Underneath the trees on the long lawn beside the station, Pullman porters took the air, chatting with each other and with conductors over the noise of steel-wheeled wagons trucking luggage into the station. Payne wanted to ride the Northern Pacific to Seattle, sitting with Ann in the observation car; perhaps jotting in a pigskin diary:
My Trip
.

I sometimes see myself, thought Payne, in other terms
than standing on the parapets with my cape flying; but not all that often.

Payne did not carry a pistol and tried not to limp.

Payne watched Clovis eat. Clovis was a nibbler; not the kind that doesn’t like to eat but the kind who tantalizes himself and makes the food last. Between nips, Clovis described the deal he’d made to build a bat installation in the top stage of an abandoned granary. Payne was to do the building by way of preparing himself for larger projects. It was to be called either a “Bathaus,” a “Batrium” or a “Battery”; but, in no case, a “Bat Tower”; the latter being reserved for the all-out projects of Clovis’ dreams.

The bat installation was being constructed for a prosperous rancher/wheat farmer whose wife liked to shell peas outside in the evening. She was allergic to 6-12 and Off.

“What if these towers draw vampires?” Payne inquired without getting an answer. Clovis nipped and nibbled, occasionally touching the merest tip of his tongue to a morsel and re-examining it before popping the whole item down his gullet.

Payne watched him. He was draped over his bones. The appliance was the only thing that seemed alive. A morbid air radiated from the man, a certain total mortality that made Payne think rather desperately of Ann.

“What are you gulping for?” Payne asked Clovis, who was swallowing air.

“I am filling my air sac.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because despair is my constant companion, I guess.”

Payne thought:
what?

“I didn’t see any mention of it in the Yellow Pages.”

“What’s in them Yellow Pages is between me and the phone company,” said Clovis.

“Okay.”

“So don’t throw the Yellow Pages in my face.”

“And those loony signs you had signed your name to in that alleyway off Gratiot Avenue.”

“Yeah, what’s wrong with them?”

“They’re unpatriotic!”

In a single violent motion, Clovis pulled the little pistol from the back of his waist band. Payne snatched it away and shot holes in the tires of the Hudson Hornet. “You want to hurt me?” he said. “There! Now my Hornet won’t go any place!” His voice broke.

“I didn’t mean a thing …” Clovis was upset now.

“You didn’t? You pulled that pistol!” Payne’s throat ached and seized. He thought he was going crazy. Bangtail Creek beside them roared like an airplane. Mayflies and caddises hatched from its surface and floated toward the stars. Two hundred yards above, it formed its first pool where a coyote made rings in the water around his nose.

The noise of the creek had prevented this small member of the dog family from hearing the argument.

Later, they went over to the Dodge Motor Home and watched Johnny Carson. Ed McMahon infuriated Clovis and he yelled at the television. The guests were Kate Smith, Dale Evans, Oscar Levant, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Norman Mailer, the artist. Johnny smiled with his eyes but not his mouth; and did all these great deadpan things. The big thing was that his outfit really suited him to a “T.” Then they watched the Late Show:
Diamondhead
; beautiful Hawaii, very complicated, very paradoxical. They actually had cowboys. But what held your interest was this unique racial deal which was dramatized by Yvette Mimieux
falling in love with a native who was darkskinned. It occurred to Clovis that since the Johnny Carson show was taped, it was possible Johnny and his guests were home watching the Late Show too.

“Is there no longer any decency?” Clovis asked.

Payne went back to his wagon to sleep. He could see, hanging in the unnatural pallor of moonlight, a heavy flitch of bacon. Vague boxes of breakfast cereal, dull except where their foil liners glittered, stood next to uneven rows of canned goods. Frying pans hung by pots hung by griddles; and in the middle of all these supplies, next to a solid sewn sack of buckwheat, a radiant Coleman lantern with a new silk mantle began to burn down for the night.

When they awoke, Payne made breakfast for the two of them over his camp stove. The deep balsamic odor of the back country surrounded them. Payne noticed the unseemly slouch the Hornet had on its slumped tires and viewed his own pathology with a certain historical detachment.

“These Little Brown Bats are starting to give me a pain in the ass,” Clovis said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Probably nothing. I had an idea I could make a go with this Yuma Myotis; but its natural range is too frigging southerly I believe. I have seen the bastards in mine shafts as far west as Idaho; but I don’t know.” He was quiet briefly. “I’m not starting on an exotic God damn bat breed at this point in my life!”

Payne tried for an intelligent remark. “The thing is, you want something that can really scarf bugs.”

“Oh, hell, they all do that. I could take a Western Pipe-strel and have the little son of a bitch eating his weight in June bugs night after night. This here is a question of
style, a question of class. I want a classy bat! And I don’t want something that has to be near running water or has to live in a narrow slot or within two miles of eucalyptus or that sucks the wind for rabies. What’s the difference. The Little Brown is okay. That goes for the Silverhaired. But no one is going to pretend they’re class bats by a long shot.”

“What’s … a class bat, for instance?”

“Well, no Myotis! That’s for damn sure!”

“What then?”

“Almost anything, Payne, for God sake. Leafnose, there’s a nice bat. Western Mastiff: that sonofabitch will curl your hair to look at him close. The Eastern Yellow is a good one. The Pallid, the Evening, the Mexican Freetail, the Spotted, the Western Yellow.” When he paused, Payne handed him his breakfast on a paper plate. When his voice came again it was mellifluous and sentimental.

“I once owned me a Seminole bat. He was mahogany brown and he looked like he had the lightest coating of frost over him. He weighed a third of an ounce at maturity and was a natural loner.”

“Did you name him?”

“Yes I did. I named him Dave.”

“I see.”

The red Texaco star was not so high against the sky as the Crazy Mountains behind it. What you wanted to be high behind the red Texaco star, thought its owner, was not the Crazy Mountains, or any others, but buildings full of people who owned automobiles that needed fuel and service. Day after day, the small traffic heading for White Sulphur Springs passed the place, already gassed up for the journey. He got only stragglers; and day after day, the same Cokes, Nehis, Hires, Fanta Oranges, Nesbitts and
Dr. Peppers stood in the same uninterrupted order in the plastic window of the dispenser. Unless he bought one. Then something else stared out at him, the same; like the candy wrappers in the display case with the sunbleached wrappers; or the missing tools on the peg-board in the garage whose silhouettes described their absence.