The Bushwacked Piano Read online

  And my eyes is open wide.…

  16

  They woke up in the morning in the sleeping bag beside the car. The bats were running all over the wire. They already knew Payne was the one who fed them: banana and bits of dessicated hamburger.

  Across a wet field in the morning in the peat smell of North Central Florida and surrounded by a wall of pines stood a rusting, corrugated steel shed with daylight coming through its sides variously. From one end, the rear quarters of a very large field mule projected; and the animal could be heard cropping within. On the broad corrugated side of the shed itself in monstrous steamboat letters, filigree draining from every corner,

  FAYE’S

  GIFT

  SHOPPE

  Payne fed the bats and started coffee on the camp stove while, her hair teased into something unbelievable, Ann shot over to Faye’s. By the time the coffee was ready, she was back at the car with long gilt earrings hanging from her ears. “Check these,” she said. “Wouldn’t they be great for when we went dancing?”

  “They would be that.”

  They could have made the Keys by nightfall. But Ann wanted to stop at a roadhouse near Homestead where she played all the Porter Wagoner, Merle Haggard, Jeannie C. Riley, Buck Owens and Tammy Wynette records on the jukebox and danced with a really unpromising collection of South Florida lettuce-pickers and midcountry drifters. Then Payne got too drunk to drive; so they slept one more night on the road at the edge of the ’glades with the bats squeaking and wanting to fly in the dark, wanting to go someplace, and Payne remembering in a way that made him upset the aborigine of ten years before.

  In his liquor stupefaction—and rather woozy anyway from the tropic sogginess and the streaked red sky and the sand flies and mosquitoes and the completely surprising softness of the air and the recent memory of the yanking jukebox dancing—he was just a little alarmed by Ann’s ardor at bedtime. She had the camera within reach and he was afraid she would pull something kinky. And then he was just detached from everything that was happening to him; so that he saw, as from afar, Ann commit a primitive oral stimulation of his parts. Engorged, frankly, as though upon a rutabaga, her slender English nose was lost in a cloud of pubic hair. They had the sleeping bag open, underneath the wagon, in case it rained. Ann detected Payne’s reserve and aggressively got atop of him, hauling at his private. There was so little room that each time her buttocks lifted, they bumped the underside of the wagon and sent the bats surging and squeaking overhead. She facetiously filled the humid evening with Wagnerian love grunts.

  They hit A1A heading down through Key Largo, the mainland becoming more and more streaked with water and the land breaking from large to small pieces until finally they were in the Keys themselves, black-green mangrove humps stretching to the horizon and strung like beads on the highway. Loused up as everything else in the country, it was still land’s end.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Payne finally asked.

  Ann turned a face to him as expressionless as a pudding under the glued, brilliant hair.

  “What do I think I’m doing?” she repeated as though to a whole roomful of people.

  On either side, the serene seascapes seemed to ridicule the nasty two-lane traffic with monster argosy cross-country trucks domineering the road in both directions. From time to time, in the thick of traffic problems, Payne would look off on the pale sand flats and see spongers with long-handled rakes standing in the bows of their wooden boats steering the rickety outboard motors with clothesline tied to their waists. Then below Islamorada he saw rusty trailers surrounded by weedy piles of lobster traps, hard-working commercial fishermen living in discarded American road effluvia.

  In Marathon, a little elevation gave him the immensity of the ocean in a more prepossessing package—less baby blue—and he saw what a piss-ant portion of the terraqueous globe the land really is. They stopped to eat and Payne had turtle. The end of that street was blocked with the jammed-in immense bows of four shrimpers. Their trawling booms were tangled overhead. He could read Southern Cross, Miss Becky, Tampa Clipper and Witchcraft. On the deck of the Tampa Clipper, a fisherman in a wooden chair, his hat pulled over his eyes, and half-awake, gave the finger to a lady who sighted him through the view finder of her Kodak. When she gave up, his arm fell to the side of the chair, his head settled at an easier angle. He was asleep.

  Suddenly, they were in the middle of Key West and lost with a wagonload of bats lurching behind them in side streets where it was hard to make a turn in the first place. They passed the Fifth Street Baptist Church and read its motto on a sign in front:

  WHERE FRIENDLINESS IS A HABIT

  AND PARKING IS NOT A PROBLEM.

  They ran into the old salt pond and had to backtrack. They cut down Tropical Avenue to Seminary Street down Seminary to Grinnell out Grinnell to Olivia and down Olivia to Poorhouse Lane where they got the car jammed and had to enlist the neighborhood; who helped until they got a good look and backed off, saying, “Bats!”

  But suddenly Payne was happy to be in Key West. It was Harry Truman’s favorite town and Harry Truman was fine by Payne. He liked Truman’s remark about getting out of the kitchen if you couldn’t stand the heat. Payne thought that beat anything in Kierkegaard. He also liked Truman’s Kansas City suits and essential Calvinized watchfob insouciance of the pre-Italian racketeer. He enjoyed the whole sense of the First Lady going bald while the daughter wheedled her way onto the Ed Sullivan show to drown the studio audience in an operatic mud bath of her own devising.

  They went past the cemetery, the biggest open space in Key West, filled with above-ground crypts, old yellow-fever victims, the sailors of the Maine, as well as the ordinary dead, if you could say that.

  Ann sneered at everything, though she had acquired, quite without irony, a rural accent.

  “What is this act?” Payne asked, as if his own attempts to extrapolate the land through mimicry of its most dubious societal features were not absurd.

  But Ann just watched the beautiful wooden houses go by; each, it seemed, separated from the other by a vacant lot full of moldering and glittering trash or by small, rusting car gardens with clumps of expired fantasies from the ateliers of Detroit.

  To Ann, at that moment, America said one beautiful thing after another.

  To Payne it said, I got all pig iron.

  “Which way to Mallory Square?”

  “Keep going.”

  They kept going and hit the Thompson—O’Neill shrimp docks.

  They went thataway. From afar, the anodized fantasm of the Dodge Motor Home was peerlessly evident. It sat under the quasi-Moorish battlements of the First National Bank. On the Motor Home, this note: “Payne: I’m at the Havana Hotel. Room 333. Get a move on. C. J. Clovis, Savonarola Batworks, Inc.”

  Clovis himself looked petulantly from the window of Room 333 with no certainty that Payne would ever come. He could see the reflecting metal roofs of Key West, the vegetation growing up between and, across town, the Coast Guard and Standard Oil docks. He wanted to play tennis but he only had one arm and one leg.

  He tried to interest himself in the builder’s plans for the tower which was to be built on nearby Mente Chica Key. But he was upset. He wanted vodka. He wanted a tart. That girl of Payne’s was a tart. Why didn’t he get rid of her? A rich tart with an old rich tart for a mother and a successful stupid male tart for a father. He should have hit the bastards for a fifteen-level bat atrium.

  Clovis was quite upset. He had an ailment.

  In a small glowing plastic cube hovered the numeral 3. Payne pressed the cube with his index finger and the doors slid shut and the two of them soared upwards. Presently, they stopped and the doors opened and there was a sign.

  ←300–350

  351–399→

  Payne turned left down the corridor, leading Ann by the hand. Ann’s prole mania made her strike up conversations with every Cuban chambermaid that were singularly brittle in the vastitude of their misunderstanding.


  Finally, room 333. A knock.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Come in. I can’t come to the door. I’ve got an ailment.”

  They went in. Clovis was on the bed, the covers pulled up under his chin. He looked peaked.

  “I’ve got one this time,” he said in the chanting voice he always used in speaking of illness.

  “What.”

  “I’ve got a real dandy on this run,” he said.

  “The other leg.”

  “No.” Clovis looked out of the window a long time. A tear tracked down his cheek. He did not look back at them. “My heart is on the fritz.”

  They sat down. This was a sorry way to start the venture. There was work to be done. It was warm. You could go for a swim and all be friends.

  “From a fugitive’s point of view,” said Clovis, pulling himself together, “this is the worst place in the world. You can’t get off the highway anywhere from here back to the mainland for a hundred-and-fifty miles. The bastards would have you funneled.”

  “Are you planning to be a fugitive?”

  “No. Payne, how are your hemorrhoids?”

  “Fine; thank you for asking.”

  “Take care of them before they get out of hand. Once they’re thrombosed you get impaction and every other damn thing.”

  “They’re already thrombosed.”

  “Then you’re in for a postoperative Waterloo.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m not having them operated on.”

  “Well, that’s just what I wanted to ask you.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Whether you wouldn’t join me in the hospital.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “This time I’m scared.”

  “I don’t care. The answer is no.”

  “Where is your humanity?” Ann inquired, thinking of how that lay at the roots of Western culture.

  “Among the dying grunions,” Payne replied, “at Redondo Beach.”

  They put everything—Hudson Hornet, wagon and motor home—under a shade tree behind the Two Friends Bar. Payne fed the bats and wondered if they missed their home in the limestone cave. It had gotten hot.

  Once inside the motor home, Payne drew all the blinds and turned on the air conditioner. It was soon comfortable and they napped on the broad foam bed. When they awoke, it was dark. Ann was chewing a large wad of gum and sipping from a bottle of whiskey she had bought at the Two Friends Bar while Payne slept. She poured him a drink without saying anything. She was strolling around without her clothes on.

  Payne swung his legs over the side of the bed. He looked and felt exhausted. Ann pivoted around toward him, the Nikon to her eye, and photographed him.

  It didn’t take her long to find the radio. She turned on a Cuban station with its Sten-gun dance music and began to pachanga up and down the aisle in some inexplicable transport. “Dance?” she called to Payne. He declined. The music was discouragingly loud. He could hardly keep his eye on her as she caromed around the inside of the motor home. Once when she shot by he made a grab for her. She kept streaking around, breasts lunging. “Dance?” she cried again. He refused, watching in wonder, and undressed, folding his clothes. “Wallflower!” He thought this painstaking reserve would be good for things. But he had an erection; so he wasn’t fooling anyone. It was aimed at his own forehead; and he felt a giddiness as of danger. He suddenly believed that the engorged penis acquires all its blood from the brain. He made Ann come over and sit on it; and she got violently exercised by the procedure. At the supreme time, his whole head seemed to be opaque. “Egad,” he barked shortly. Payne really looked at her for the first time that night; she seemed awfully big and the cascade of silver hair disoriented him entirely. When he withdrew, a translucent tendril connected them an instant longer, then fell glistening on one of her perfect thighs.

  Payne turned off Radio Havana. Someone was giving the sugar quotas, province by province, arroba by arroba. He found a brownie with walnuts and ate it, not bothering to dress. He had a little drink. He looked around himself. Ann was lying on the couch next to the settee. Overhead a lighting that felt sourceless but was probably fluorescent shone with a lunar absence of shadows. It was like being in an atomic submarine; perhaps, inside a vacuum cleaner was more accurate. Everything was built in. Nothing stood clear of the curved walls. The whole inside of the motor home was a variation on the tube theme. They were in an intestine, Payne thought giddily; and digestion was worse than anything the Waring Blender could do to you.

  Payne thought that the rug had been pulled out from under his crazy act. Ann’s was beginning to look a little more marginal than his, if that was possible. Yet he had—he thought—a purpose behind his and still did; which was, in the vernacular, getting it all together. On the old motorcycle excursion, he had tried to draw a line around it all; now he was trying to color it all in.

  From time to time that night, drunken shrimpers beat on the door. “Invasion of privacy,” thought Payne. He had nowhere else to put the vehicles; so this activity would have to be discouraged completely. They tried to sleep awhile; but it was never long before the uproar began anew. Then he heard a number of them arguing in some drunk’s comedy and one of them tried to force open the door. “Breaking and entering,” Payne thought. They knew there was a female in here and had gone entirely doggy. The door of the motor home bulged and Ann was frightened completely if temporarily out of her hillbilly act. Payne got up, rifling through drawers.

  He found in Clovis’ underwear drawer the revolver he had recently employed to bushwhack the tires on his Hudson Hornet. Payne was wearing only his shorts. Nevertheless, when he opened the door, stepped down and circulated among the drunks with the revolver, he was found to be, in his own way, strangely impressive. The drunks had a leader in the person of a stringy individual with a Confederate flag tattooed on his forearm that said, Hell, no, I ain’t forgetting. This man proposed to disarm Payne and go aboard. He said that anyone who pulled a gun better be prepared to use it. But when Payne took a handful of his cheek, put the barrel of the gun inside of his mouth and offered to blow his brains all over the Gulf of Mexico, there was a loss of interest in tampering with the motor home or going aboard at all. They could tell that Payne had reached that curious emotional plateau which did not necessarily have anything to do with anger that, once gained, let one man kill another. Payne would never have known until he had done it; but complete strangers could tell beforehand. So Payne went back aboard only wondering why he had not been nervous; and not realizing how near he had been to a most significant human act; while the drunks now squealing, revving, popping clutches and roaring off were all somewhat sobered up with how close it had been.

  The owner of the bar came out. “Sorry those old boys took it in their heads to pester you. Sorry as hell.”

  “No bother at all,” Payne said. The man was studying him, trying to guess how much he would put up with. “I do feel you ought to know that the next time it happens I will kill people.” Payne thought he was telling a lie. The owner’s face whitened.

  “I’ll pass that on,” he said.

  “In the end they’ll like it that way better.”

  The bar owner laughed very slightly.

  “I expect they will,” he agreed. “I will sholy pass it on.”

  Payne climbed back in and locked the door. Ann looked at him as he put the pistol up. She had photographed him standing in the doorway in his shorts, as he turned back into the artificial light, the revolver hanging by its trigger guard from his forefinger. He looked transported.

  “I’m a king bee, baby,” he said.

  “Have you fed the bats?” she asked.

  First thing in the morning, Payne and Clovis met with a Cuban named Diego Fama who would act as co-foreman and interpreter on the tower project. Clovis wanted to use entirely refugee labor. He said he wanted to do his part to make opposition to Castro attractive.

  Diego Fama was a muscular co
ntractor type, his Cuban–Indian physiognomy to the contrary notwithstanding. He had startling big forearms which he crisscrossed high on his chest when listening. He did not speak English particularly well; but listened to the planning with heavy, Germanic attention. He already understood the project better than Payne and Clovis. “Easy job,” he said precisely when the talk was done.

  “How long?”

  “Under a week.” The news embarrassed both Payne and Clovis with respect to the price they were getting; but not for long.

  “How many men?”

  “I figure that out,” Diego Fama said. “I say now though possibly twenty of these persons.”

  “Where will you find them?” Payne asked.

  “I figure that out,” Fama replied balefully.

  “And what is your subcontracting charge?”

  “Three thousand dollars,” Fama said. It was unbelievably cheap.

  “That’s high,” Clovis said, “but we accept. When do we start?”

  “Monday in the morning.”

  When Fama was gone, Clovis wrote out a bill on the kind of pad waitresses carry and gave it to Payne for examination.

  BILL

  1 Bat Tower $16,000.00

  1500 Standard Bats $1500.00

  1 Guano Trap w/ storage receptacle $1000.00

  1 Special Epoxy Tropical Paint,

  Brushes and Thinner $500.00

  THANK YOU. PLEASE CALL AGAIN.

  “I’m surprised at you,” said Ann back at the motor home, “treating the old fart like that.”

  “Are you?”

  “He’s scared to death his ailment is going to carry him off.”

  “How would it help if I went in and had my butt trimmed?”

  “Surprised at you,” she said, “leaving him in the lurch.”

  “I’m not leaving him in the lurch.”

  “The lurch.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Explain it if you’re not,” she said and as he started to rage, she raised her camera to photograph him. He got in a conventional wedding-portrait smile before she could snap it. “Surprised at you,” she said.