The Bushwacked Piano (14 page)

“Yes,” said Ann. Her soundest social notion was that everyone in the world was too crazy to beat up.

Codd walked down the hallway, the bulldogging heels of his tiny cowboy boots ringing on the hardwood. With a light feinting gesture of the head, he avoided injury by elk’s antler at the corner of the living room; with a low scuttling jump, he avoided entanglement with bearskin at the front of the grotesque travertine fireplace with its iron firedogs and prestolite scented simulogs. Pivoting in a sharp dido around the far entrance to the living room, he was in an identical hallway where, once more, there was the ringing of the tiny boots as his forward bolting posture soon hurtled him through the far screen door. On the lawn, he walked over the cesspool, invisible to him under the sod; among the heavy willows he strode toward his bunkhouse beneath the singular tattoo of Orion.

Hanging, later, upended over the dormer window of Ann’s room, he watched her mock burlesque before Payne, their subsequent entanglement, her compact uplift of blushing buttock, his paler flesh and hers flaring in their seizure, the long terrific prelude and final, spasmic, conjunctive entry, marked, unknown to either of them, by the gloomy jetting of Codd against the shingles overhead.

Codd, spent, saw the rooftree sink suddenly in his vision, Orion start up, and realized he was falling. In a terror of being perceived hanging from the lintel, his livery about his knees, he launched himself into space, plunged into a lucky willow and merged himself against the heavy rigid trunk while Payne knuckled up and down the sill saying I know you’re out there.

Satisfied that it had only been a limb falling, Payne returned to Ann, lying upon her stomach. The peerless, long back arced up at her bottom; Payne sat next to her and slid his hand underneath, thinking this is where Darwin got the notion of primordial ooze; put a speck of it under a microscope and see Shakespeare leaping through time; also, lobsters, salamanders, one coelacanth. He knelt between her thighs, raised her hips, thrust and flooded helplessly. My God. How many fan letters could you seal with that. Enough to get the message across, perhaps. Mock turtle soup.

Leaving Ann’s room and proceeding to his own, he passed, in the lugubrious great hall of the house, Mister Fitzgerald, smoking peevishly and adjusting with one glowing foot an ornate iron firedog.

“Evening, sir.”

“Well, Payne, good evening.”

“Do you want to speak to me?” Payne asked.

“Not at all.”

Payne continued past the stone entry of that really funny room and into the glossy varnished passageway to his own quarters. About halfway down that corridor, he ran into Wayne Codd who, from his position within an insignificant shadow cast by a large plaster-of-paris penguin, inquired whether or not Payne would care to fight.

“No,” Payne said, and went to his room where he admired the drum-tight Hudson’s Bay blanket with its four black lines for the indication of class or general snazz. He had locked the door; but it was a short time before the clicking of Codd’s skeleton key groping for the indifferent tumblers of Payne’s lock was heard. Payne patted the cool surface of the sheet. “This is a happy Western lodge,” he said to himself. “I smell elk in this pillow.” Then close to the door, he said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’ll unlock it.” For a long moment, he made no movement. “You’ll have to pull the key out.”

“Okay.” The key was extracted.

“Come in,” Payne said. The knob wrenched and the door did not open.

“It’s still locked,” came the ululating voice, urgent with wrath.

“Hang on. Just a sec.” Payne brushed his teeth. “What did you call me?” No answer, but once more the swift perfect failure of the skeleton key. Payne’s ablutions were most complete. He brushed first smartly the teeth then smoothly the hair. He never once poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. He adjusted trimly the clavicles and elevated the coccyx at a racy angle like a Masai. By way of preparation, he bounded around the room in what came to seem a perfect frenzy. Abruptly, he flung open the door, knocked Codd unconscious, closed the door and turned in for the night.

Presently, however, a brisk knocking was heard upon
the door and Payne answered, expecting to find the drear, abnormally expanded face of the recently comatose Codd. Unexpectedly, he found instead Fitzgerald, at pains not to tread upon his foreman.

“What’s with him?”

“Receipt of blow to his chops. The hydraulic effect of that, you might say, toward a reduction of consciousness.” Fitzgerald stepped over him and entered the room. “I know why you’ve come.”

“You do?”

“Oui, mon enfant,”
said Payne, “you want to invite me into your family.”

“Do you realize how inexpensively I could have you shot?”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“But I’m alarmed you would maintain such connections.”

“Well, goodnight then, Payne.”

“Goodnight to you sir. I trust these morbid preoccupations of yours will not trouble your sleep. Look at it this way, I could have you shot as cheaply. I presume the price is within both our means.”

“Yes, I suppose. Well, goodnight then, Payne.” He went out, taking elaborate pains not to step into the face of his foreman, Wayne Codd. Payne went to sleep, moved by the pismire futilities of moguls—their perpetual dreams, that is, of what could be done with the money.

A long gliding sleep for Payne was followed by a call to breakfast. He stumbled into the hallway and found himself in some sort of procession, the whole family moving in one direction, deploying finally in silence around a glass pantry table. They were served by an old Indian lady who maintained a stern air that kept everyone silent. Plates were put on the table with unnecessary noise. Then, when it seemed finally comfortable to eat, there was an uproar in the hallway. Behind Codd, darkling with rage, came the fabulous multiple amputee of untoward bat-tower dreams—none the worse for wear—C. J. Clovis, variously sustained with handsomely machined aluminum mechanisms and superstructures; around which the expensive flannel he affected (and now a snap-brim pearly Dobbs) seemed to drape with a wondrous futuristic elegance. The Indian woman stepped through the smoked-glass French doors in petulant response to the noise. Breakfast was ordered for Clovis. The Fitzgeralds arose, smiling gaily aghast. Admittedly, the rather metallurgical surface Clovis presented to the world would have
been intimidating to anyone who hadn’t been in on the process.

Payne made the introductions. Codd, sporting welts, bowed out. Payne watched him until his attention returned to the others; he found Clovis already selling a bat tower.

“We don’t want a bat tower, Mister Clovis,” said La.

“In what sense do you mean that?”

“In any sense whatever.”

Clovis gave them the encephalitis routine—mosquitoes as pus-filled syringes, et cetera, et cetera—including a fascinating rendition of death by microbe during which his plump sagging little carcass writhed mournfully beneath the abrupt motions of the metal limbs. From the viewpoint of the Fitzgeralds, it was really appalling. Coffee and toast cooled without interference. Fitzgerald himself was perfectly bug-eyed; though by some peculiar association he remembered canoeing at a summer camp near Blue Hill, Maine; afterwards (1921), he had puked at a clambake.

“Still don’t want bats?” Clovis asked in a tiny voice.

Missus Fitzgerald, who could really keep her eye on the ball, said, “Nyao. And we don’t want the tower either.”

“Where’s my breakfast?” roared Clovis.

“We want to live together,” Ann addressed her mother. “Nicholas and I.”

“How did you pick us?” Fitzgerald asked Clovis.

“I was looking for my foreman.”

“Shut your little mouth,” Missus Fitzgerald told her daughter, who gnawed fitfully at a sausage. Codd was at the door once again.

“Write my check,” he said, “I’ve had the course.”

“We’ll talk about this after breakfast,” Fitzgerald said to him. “You may be right.”

“It’s him or me,” Codd said.

“Quite right,” Fitzgerald said, “but later, okay? We’ll have it all out.”

“I’m old enough to make this decision,” Ann told her mother. Codd went out. Clovis’ breakfast came. He scowled at the lady of Amerind extraction who drummed around the table splashing cups full of coffee.

“What did you say?” Fitzgerald, this shocked man, asked his daughter.

“Nicholas and I wish to set up housekeeping.”

“You just aren’t fussy,” her mother accused, “are you.”

“And it’s time she got started,” Dad averred.

“Well, she’s not, Duke. She’s not fussy and she never was.”

“Life has a way of bringing out fussiness.”

“Ann,” said her mother, “I hate to see you learn to be fussy the hard way.”

“I told you later!” said Fitzgerald to Codd who had reappeared. “Now get.” Codd shrank away. “Not one bat tower,” he said, catching Clovis’ eye.

“I can get it for you cheap,” Clovis said.

“Tell us you don’t mean that,” Missus Fitzgerald said.

“I don’t mean that.” Ann shrugged.

Now Clovis really began to eat as if there were no tomorrow, shooting through not only his own large breakfast, but all the leftovers as well. At one point, he had three pieces of toast and an unsqueezed grapefruit clamped in the appliance. It would be friendly and fun to say that he held the others in thrall.

Payne excused himself with the tiny wink that means the toilet; and escaped. The truth was the blood vessels in his head were pounding in an apoplectic surge. He went outside under the exploding cottonwoods and hot mountain light feeling an upwelling of relief of freedom of
space of scarcity of knowing there was the invisible purling descent of mountain water someplace right close. In the watercourses on the side slope he could see green hands of aspen the million twirling leaves. Then he jumped into the Hornet and bolted.

A time-lapse photograph would have shown the palest mint-green band against the mountains and the steady showering of transcontinental earthclods from the dying rocker panels and perforated bulbosities of fender. Behind the spiraling lizard of glass-faults, the preoccupied face of him, of Payne. What did he ever do to anybody?

The man at the Texaco who had excited himself about the bushwhacked recaps said, “Go ahead and use it. Not long distance, we hope.” Payne looked around. There was no one else. “We?”

“You and me.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no just a local call.”

A minute later, Payne asked Codd to give him Clovis. Clovis came to the phone.

“Hello?” he asked warily.

“Me, Payne. Get out of there. I don’t want you peddling a tower to my future in-laws.”

“Future in-laws. You ought to hear them on the subject of you, pal.”

“I have and don’t want to anymore.”

“A horse who isn’t gwine finish.”

“I don’t need to know that.”

“Where are you?”

“The Texaco.”

“Are you coming back ever?” So Clovis had picked up the true pitch of Payne’s departure.

“The body says yes.”

He’d been gone an hour. When he sat down at the table,
he could see the Fitzgeralds sniffing the Hornet’s fuel leaks. Once Payne saw a picture of André Gide in his library, wearing a comfy skull cap, looking at a bound folio and puffing his Gauloise cigarette. Thinking of that now, Payne couldn’t completely see why he should continue to take his lumps here in the presence of breakfast scraps and depleted grapefruits.

“We’ve been having an incredible conversation with your boss,” Missus Fitzgerald said to him.

“Good,” Payne said.

“About these oddities, these bat towers, you two are pushing.”

“I’m just the simple carpenter,” Payne said.

“Mister Clovis says you’re going to Key West,” said Fitzgerald, unnaturally elated to be able to announce this.

“It’s news to me.”

“Yup,” Clovis grinned, “it’s so. Are you ready for the rest?”

“I am.”

“I nailed them for twenty G’s: one tower and one only. Naturally, it will be our masterpiece.” Payne was pleased with the news; though it pained him to have Clovis use his confidence tone in front of the Fitzgeralds. “One catch. No bats down there. We’re going to have to bring our own. Just a detail. And you did hear me about the twenty G’s.”

“Yes,” Payne winced. They conversed as though the room were empty of anyone but themselves.

“You shoulda seen the two-page telegrams I was whamming down there. You didn’t know it but I composed the damn queries in that creekbottom. And you oughta seen my literary style. Right out of the adventurer William Beebe whose underwater footsteps I have always longed to trace through the atolls of Micronesia.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” Clovis said, “and how we got them.”

About the time that it became plain that Payne would not only clear out soon but perhaps—even if it was not plain to the Fitzgeralds—take Ann along with him, Codd began to conduct a curious delineation of his own plans all toward asking himself the question whether or not he was willing to go to the State Penitentiary at Deer Lodge and there to manufacture license plates for automobiles, all for the pleasure of busting Nicholas Payne down to size and, in some ultimate manner,
fix
him for good. The question was in the long run one that sprang from a fantasy of himself scuttling out of a low, dense bush, whirring almost invisible out of that bush with his speed, to hit Payne over the head with something of a single ball-peen density sufficient to prevent the rising of Payne again from the spot on anything but a litter for the deceased. He giggled with a thought of Payne afloat in brains and spinal fluid. R.I.P. if you think you deserve it because here’s where God takes over! Wayne was a religious boy.