The Bushwacked Piano Read online

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” La smiled, boiled eggs for eyes. “We don’t operate that way.”

  “Fill them in, Heath.”

  Heath ingratiated himself with a suggested, if not actual, undulance and a winning meringue smile. The Fitzgeralds were thrown into ghastly discomfort. “There are any number of writs we can serve you with at this time,” he began. “I have advised my client to pursue an individual suit in the amount of two millions. Mister Payne has a fetching inability to speculate in terms of such numbers. So I showed him the tax assessor’s rather conservative estimate of the value of your ranch and assured my client there would be quite a bit of change left over! I do not hint at avarice by any means when I say that this procedure has had the effect of piquing Mister Payne’s interest. And of course we have not given up the notion of going for the wig bank as well. My own point of view is based on the fact that I am here on speculation. And it costs me twenty thousand dollars a week to leave my office in Los Angeles.

  “Furthermore … a mint?” They shook their heads. He ate one, palming the foil. “Furthermore, a Mister Wayne Codd, temporarily resident in the fearful little city, has signed his name to half a dozen statements of his own composition. My evaluation is that they hint at a criminal dimension to this affair that could be explored with a mind to not only cleaning you out but salting you away!” He muttered insincerely to himself that he must abjure the vernacular, then cried, “Acky poo! I know how you feel about that! In the beginning, I didn’t see why I should leave Los Angeles. I just didn’t. But there was something that turned me on. Something that thrilled me and I searched it out. I lay in my Barcalounger until it came. And it turned out that it was the fact that we had both punitive and compensatory options in prosecuting this suit that gave me, frankly, a kind of hard-on to represent this man.” Then Heath admitted to his voice a dry Episcopal scorn he had learned many years before at the Cranbrook School for Boys.

  “Mister Payne has made me promise to say this: He will call me off in the event your daughter goes to Florida not only unhindered but without disapproval expressed through inheritance provisos.” Heath was counting on a certain Republican solidity in the Fitzgeralds to keep his case airtight.

  “We will not be blackmailed,” one or possibly both of the Fitzgeralds said firmly.

  “Presumably not,” said Heath, “and that point of view fills me with pleasure. I personally never expected you to sell your daughter down the river in quite the manner indicated here.”

  “Heath,” Payne said, “you’re chiseling.”

  “Quite right.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t have any of your damn greediness,” Payne said. Heath was chastised.

  “You’re absolutely correct,” he said; he could afford this. Payne had the opposition dead to rights.

  “I suggest you drop everything you’ve said,” Missus Fitzgerald announced, looking at the ceiling with a bored recitative air, “while you still have something left.”

  “There’s nothing more to add, madame,” said Heath, not only a lawyer, husband and father, but an influential man who had given Los Angeles Episcopalianism its particular sheen. “You know how it stands. I assume we begin suit. Do contact your own attorney immediately; and be sure he’s good.” Frivolous imitations of generosity by Egdon Heath.

  “I should have thought your investigations would demonstrate that we have effective counsel,” said Missus Fitzgerald, her words and words only having any conviction.

  Fitzgerald himself broke in, chuckling to himself for quite some time. “You lawyers have tickled me for years. You’re all pork-and-beaners till the day you die. I don’t care if you make a million a day.”

  “Go ahead. You’re bagged. Get in a speech.”

  “May I go on, Mister Heath? I was saying I really have to chuckle—” He showed how you do. “—when I think of you guys. You never get the human underpinning into your heads. You’re constantly trotting out your writs and enjoinders without ever seeing that the law is a simple extension of the most ordinary human affairs.”

  “That’s not true. Go ahead.”

  “May I continue, Mister Heath?”

  “Do that. But you’re bagged and bagged big.”

  “May I go on you fucking shyster?”

  “Duke!”

  “Daddy!”

  “Wildly and emotionally inaccurate. But go on.”

  Fitzgerald composed himself and said, “What you as a particular lawyer have missed in this particular instance expresses perfectly what I am saying.” Fitzgerald sat on his triumph like a jocular playmate. “Our daughter has already expressed a wish to go off with Mister Payne!” Missus Fitzgerald joined the fun of a smiling triumph directed at this L.A. pinhead.

  “I know that,” said Heath simply.

  “Then what’s the problem?” one or possibly both of the Fitzgeralds asked at once.

  “You said she couldn’t go,” Heath said with even greater simplicity.

  “Your small sense of conduct surprises us in a professional man of law,” said Missus Fitzgerald. “Any parent would recognize our refusal as a way mothers and fathers have of stalling for time while they make up their minds.” Her pronunciation of the words “mother” and “father” was straight out of Dick And Jane. The Fitzgeralds looked at each other. They were winging it together, depending now on their intimacy, their knowledge of each other. This would be a test of what their marriage was founded upon.

  “We have decided,” said Mister Fitzgerald, looking hopefully at his bride, “that Ann is old enough to make her own decisions. In this case—” Oh, this was beautiful. “—we definitely do not approve of her decision.”

  “But will you stand in her way?” Heath, out of control, pleaded.

  “No.”

  “What! You’re opening the door to lewdness!”

  “Heath,” Payne warned.

  “She’s a grown woman,” Missus Fitzgerald insisted.

  Heath began to shout: “There’s a question of consortium here, God damn it! It is technically questionable if these people have a right to intercourse. And without that legal right they are fornicators! You call yourself parents in the face of this abrogation of decency!”

  Payne: “Shut up, Heath. Shut up and get out.”

  Heath ignored him. “A minor distrainment of your chattels and you sell your child into bondage! Let me ask you one thing. Let me ask you this. Have you questioned the effect of bastardy on the esteem you doubtless hold in your community? I mean, what if there is illegitimate issue? What if there is?”

  Payne lay on his side now holding his head. The others were rigid with horror as the white-knuckled L.A. shyster circled them sinfully. “Let us talk reason. Exemplary or punitive damages in this action are extremely unlikely, right? The community has no need to make an example of you. Do you follow me? In equity, the assessment of damages is wholly within the discretion of the court where you will be more likely to get sympathetic treatment than my client. I mean, look at him. He looks like a crackpot. My client is everybody’s fantasy of an ambulatory anarchist. Isn’t he yours? Ask yourself that.

  “Now lastly—and try to get this straight—it is the plaintiff’s responsibility to keep damages to the minimum indicated by the tort. In this instance, the multiple of damages actually sustained is difficult to specify.

  “I advise that you settle out of court. I advise that you keep your daughter in the home in which she belongs.”

  “How much?” Fitzgerald asked.

  “I’m thinking of a hundred grand.”

  “The hell with that noise,” Fitzgerald said and walked, his wife beside him, with dignity from the room. They would have to buy some champagne and celebrate their victory.

  Ann delayed. She leaned over Payne’s bed and filled Payne’s ear with hot breath when she said, “They’ve sold me down the river, darling. It’s you and me now.” She left.

  On his own way out, Egdon Heath said, somewhat acidly, to Payne, “I
ought at least to nail you for my air fare.”

  “That’s the life of a speculator,” Payne said. “Nice try.”

  Payne was whacked out. He made friends with the nurse who attended him. She had tiny close-set eyes and an upturned bulbous nose. She told Payne her life story pausing upon occasion to break into tears. She had remained unwed through her thirties; then suddenly married an elderly motorist from a nearby town. Recently he told her that it had not in the least been love at first sight. So there was that for her to cry about. Payne took her hand, seeing her face at the end of a tube, and told her, “Don’t sweat it, darling,” in his most reassuring glottal baritone.

  They didn’t do a thing to Payne but take one kind of reading or another, including an X-ray. They took readings day after day. “What’s my temperature?” Payne would ask. Or, “What’s my pulse?” Or, “What’s my blood pressure?” One day, sleepily, he inquired, “What numbers am I, Doctor?”

  “Quite a few,” the doctor said. “All of us are.”

  One thing Payne thought of continually was the time he blasted the piano with his .22, the beautiful splintering of excessively finished wood, the broken strings curling away from liberated beams of spicy piano light, the warm walnut stock of his .22, the other spice of spent shells, the word hollowpoint, the anger of the enemy, the silver discs the bullets made on the window, the simple precision of a peep sight, the blue of barrel steel, the name Winchester when you were in America, the world of BB Caps, Shorts, Longs, and Long Rifles, the incessant urge to louse up monuments, even the private piano monument he perforated from a beautiful tree with an almost blinding urgent vision of the miserable thing ending in an uproar of shattered mahogany, ivory, ebony and wire. No more Bach chords to fill the trees with their stern negation. There’s no room here for a piano, he remembered righteously. No pianos here please.

  Ann sat in the front of the Hudson. Just as in the songs, she had hair of sparkling gold and lips like cherry wine. Perhaps, hair of sparkling pewter and lips the color of a drink called Cold Duck. She looked like an awful floozy. Her eyes had melting antimony edging on their lids. God only knew what she had in mind. She looked as round-heeled as a tuppeny upright after ten years of throwing standing crotch locks on every womb worm that came her way.

  His vision, however, had improved; to the effect that the world no longer appeared as a circular vista at the end of a conduit. His urge to ride on the highway was now a quiet, tingling mania.

  “Let us hear from you,” the Fitzgeralds said when the kissing had stopped.

  “Sure will,” Ann said, “I’ll drop you a line one of these days.” Her parents looked at her. They needed the right word and quick. Something had gone entirely dead here.

  “Let us know if you need anything,” her mother tried.

  “Yeah, right.” Payne started to back around. “Take it easy,” Ann said. And they left.

  “I guess,” Ann said after they had driven a while, “it had gotten to be time for me to cut out.”

  “All right,” Payne said, “now take it easy.”

  “Darling, I’m upset.”

  “Yes, me too. My head is all fouled up.”

  “I feel like a hoor,” she said. Payne felt a distant obligation to contradict her.

  They passed through the box canyon of the Yellowstone where the venturi effect of chinook winds will lift a half-ton pickup right to the top of its load leveler shocks and make the driver think of ghost riders in the sky until the springs seat again and the long invisible curves of wind unknit and drive him through the canyon as though his speed were laid on him as paint.

  Some hours later, Ann seemed to have fallen into a bad mood. “Where are we going?”

  “Bat country,” said Payne. That quieted her down.

  “You know what?” she asked later.

  “What?”

  “This damn car of yours is coming off on my clothes.”

  At Apollinaris Spring, Ann thought: My God, if George ever saw me pull a low-rent trick like this! In fact that’s something to think about. She began to record the voyage with her camera.

  They dropped down into Wyoming and headed for Lander, running through implausible country where Sacajawea and Gerald McBoingBoing fought for the table scraps of U.S.A. history.

  Coming down through Colorado, still west of the Divide, they passed a small intentional community—people their own age—all of whose buildings were geodesic domes made of the tops of junked automobiles. Payne could see gardens, a well, a solar heater and wanted to go down. But the members of the community were all crowding around down there and rubbing each other. They were packing in down there and Payne felt the awful shadow of the Waring Blender and drove on. Ann was mad. “Why won’t you mix, God damn it?” I read Schopenhauer, Payne thought, that tease!

  They headed for Durango, stayed for a day, then dropped into New Mexico and headed for Big Spring, Texas.

  They cut across Amarillo and made a beeline for Shreveport on a red-hot autumn day to Columbia, Florida, where Payne had been sent in the first place by Cletus James Clovis. This was bat country. Payne took a piece of paper out of his pocket. A short time later, he was knocking on the door of a reconditioned sharecropper’s house. When the man opened the door, Payne saw the wall behind covered with curing gator skins. “C. J. Clovis said to see you about bats,” Payne said. The poacher told them to come in and have something cool to drink.

  A day later, Payne, with his biggest hang-over ever, and his companion, the poacher Junior Place, with a big one of his own; and Ann snoozing in the Hornet with an actual puker of a white lightning hang-over and her peroxide beehive full of sticks and bits of crap of one description or another, and the North Florida sun coming in like a suicide; the men paused at the end of the sandy road in the palmettos beside a pile of wrecked automobiles each of which held a little glass-and-metal still—the product of which drew a considerably better price locally than any bonded sauce you could find out at your shopping plaza. Payne was flattered at this confidential disclosure.

  They had little distance to go. Junior had loaned Payne a pair of his own snakeproof pants—citrus picker’s trousers with heavy-gauge screen sewn inside a canvas sleeve from the knee down. And the two of them crossed the palmettos on a gradually upward incline, near the crest of which Junior Place began to scout back and forth for the mouth of the cave.

  He told Payne to feel as best he could for a breeze. So Payne wandered the crest of the hill, feeling for a breeze that came to him shortly as a breath of something cool and watery, something subterranean rising around him. He found the entrance in a cluster of brush from which a solid cool shaft of air poured. He called out its location.

  The two men carried triangular nets on long hardwood poles. Payne had his nine-battery Ray-O-Vac and Junior Place carried a carbide lamp. Junior came over and pushed aside the brush to reveal a coal-black oval in the ground, a lightless hole through which he slid as from long practice.

  It proves one thing about Payne that he followed straightaway. He wanted to maintain voice contact. “How do you know C. J. Clovis?”

  “Hardly know him a tall,” said Place. There was no way of knowing the immensity of this blackness; it sucked away Payne’s voice without an echo.

  There were things going by his head at tremendous speed. “I had a five-minute talk with the man,” said Place. “He is a freak of nature.” The blackness pressed Payne’s face. “I’d do anything in the world for him. Come up side of me now. Okay, use the lamp.” The lights went on. The paleness of the limestone hall surprised and terrified Payne. The colliding planes of wall and ceiling appeared serene and futuristic and cold. Every overhead surface was festooned with bats. They were all folded, though some, alive to the presence of the men, craned around; and a few dropped and flew squeaking crazily through the beams of light. Then a number more came down, whirled through the room with the others; and as if by signal they all returned to the ceiling.

  They set the lights where they
would give them advantageous illumination; and with the long-handled nets commenced scraping pole-breaking loads from the ceiling. A million bats exploded free and circulated through the chamber in a crescendo of squeaking. They upended the bats in the plastic mesh bags and continued swiping over head. By now, they needed only to hold the nets aloft and they would fill until they could not be held overhead.

  Bats poured at Payne like jet engine exhaust; pure stripes and curves of solid hurtling bats filled the air to saturation. The rush and squeaking around Payne were making him levitate. As when the dogs were in the house, he no longer knew which way his head or feet were pointing. He had no idea where the entrance was. Junior Place continued at the job, a man hoeing his garden. Payne whirled like a propeller.

  When it was over, Payne had to be led out of the cave, carrying his net and shopping bag. There was an awful moment as the entrance began to pack all around him with escaping bats. When he finally stood outside the hole, he watched a single, towering black funnel, its point at the hole, form and tower over him.

  He would have to tell Clovis: a tower actually made of bats.

  They liberated the bats in the wagon behind the Hudson. The bats circulated, a wild squeaking whirlwind, before sticking to the screen sides to squeak angrily out at the men. Some of the bats, their umbrella wings partially open, crept awkwardly around the bottom of the wagon before clinging to the screened sides. Soon a number of them were hanging from the roof adaptably.

  “Do you have any idea what a hang-over is like in the face of that?” Ann asked the two men.

  They said goodbye to Junior Place at the end of the road. Payne returned the pants, gingerly fishing his own from the wagon.

  Ann slumped against him and fell asleep once more. Place, at the end of his white lightning road, waved a straw hat and held his nets overhead at the edge of a palmetto wilderness in his snakeproof pants.

  Payne aimed the load for Key West.

  I got ten four gears

  And a Georgia overdrive.

  I’m takin little white pills