The Bushwacked Piano Read online

  If Ann were here she would look at him, eyes reeling with meaning. She would never have seen the humor of the sign on the next building which showed five crudely drawn French poodles spelling out PILGRIM COUNTRY over a New England landscape in technicolor dogspew. How would she take the last picture Payne could find which showed a “farmer” attacking a “housewife” whom he has caught stealing, by moonlight, in his vegetable garden? Underneath, “Here’s a cucumber you won’t forget!”

  Payne, agog, sped, by foot, away from the area; and ended sitting on a curb. The question was whether he had seen that stuff at all. That was the question, actually.

  Cautiously, he returned to the telephone booth and called Clovis’ number and listened in silence to a recorded message: “Hello, ah, hello, ah, hellowah thur, zat you, Bob, Marty, Jan, Edna, Dexter, Desmond, Desilu, Dee-Dee, Daryl, dogfight, fistfood …”

  Payne was slipping.

  To his credit, he asked himself, “Did I hear that?”

  The sun fell far astern of the alleyway.

  A tired rat picked its way among the remains of an innerspring mattress, determined to find The Way.

  A dark brown elevator cable suspending a conventload of aging nuns in front of the fortieth-floor office of a Knights of Columbus dentist, popped one more microscopic strand in a thousand-foot shaft of blue dust light.

  Certain soldiers took up their positions.

  An engineer in Menlo Park pondered possible mailboxes of the future.

  In the half-light of an office, a clerk had a typist; the landlord, spying from a maintenance closet, made his eyes ache in the not good light and thought he saw two Brillo pads fighting for a frankfurter.

  “I don’t claim to be a saint,” Payne remarked.

  One leg had gone lame, his pocket itched for his old heater, his old Hartford Equalizer.

  Millions of sonorous, invisible piano wires caused the country to swing in stately, dolorous circles around the telephone booth. Payne felt it hum through the worn black handle of the folding door. The directory, with its thousandfold exponential referents, tapped with the secret life of the nation.

  He went off now, thinking of Ann: impossible not to imagine himself and Ann in some cosmic twinning; they float on fleecy cumulo-nimbus, a montage of saints says: It is meet.

  And, picturing himself against the high interiors of the Mountain West, he thought of old motorcycle excursions. He looked at the Hudson Hornet and asked, will it do?

  5

  The Hudson Hornet appears at the mouth of a long bend, a two-lane county road in the Pryor Mountains of Montana. Bare streaks in wooded country, glacial moraine, scree slides like lapping tongues, sage in the creek bottoms, aspen and cottonwood. Behind the lurching Hornet, a homemade wagon rumbles on four six-ply recaps from the factory of Firestone and Co. The wagon is the work of the driver, Nicholas Payne. With a bowed gypsy roof, the sides are screen with hardwood uprights. Inside are bedrolls, an ammunition tin filled with paperbacks, a stack of Django Reinhardt records, a cheap Japanese tape recorder; banging from side to side in the springless wagon, a sheepherder’s stove seems to dominate everything; its pipe can be run up through an asbestos ring in the roof and an awning lowered to enclose the sides. There is a Winchester .22 for camp meat. There is a fishing rod.

  Payne walked around Livingston, hands deep in pockets, head deep in thought, feet deep in the dark secrecy of boots. He went into Gogol’s Ranchwear and Saddlery to try on footwear. He had no money but he wanted ideas. He felt if he could hit on the right boots, things would be better. His throat ached with the knowledge that it would not be impossible for him to run into Ann in this town. “Howdy!” The salesman. Payne sat.

  “Boots,” he said.

  “What you got in mind?”

  “Not a thing other than boots.”

  “Okee doke.”

  “Can I charge them?”

  “Live in town?”

  “I sure do,” Payne said.

  “Then go to her,” said the salesman. “Let’s get you started here.” He brought a pair of boots down from the display stand. He rested the heel of one in his left palm and supported its toe with the fingertips of his right hand. “Here’s a number that sells real well here in Big Sky Country. It’s all-American made from veal leather with that ole Buffalo Bill high stovepipe top. I can give you this boot in buff-ruff, natural kangaroo or antique gold—”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “It is not right that a cowboy should dress up like a fruit.”

  “Now you listen to me. I just sold a pair of boots to a working cowboy in pink turtleskin and contrasting water buffalo wingtips.”

  “You don’t have to get mad.”

  “I sold a pair of dual re-tan latigo leather Javelinas with peach vamps to a real man. And you tell me fruit.”

  “No one said you had to be a meanie about it.”

  “Okay, we drop it.” The clerk insisted that they shake hands. “Let’s get you into a pair.”

  “Now I want tennis shoes in mocha java.”

  “I thought you wanted boots.”

  “If I go barefoot will you tint my pinkies Antique Parmesan?”

  “Sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “Gogol’s Ranchwear and Saddlery doesn’t want your business.”

  Payne went to the front of the store, stepped up to the X-ray machine, flipped it on and put his eyes to the viewer. There was a handle at its side that controlled the pointer which Payne directed at the memento mori of his skeletal feet on a billiard-cloth green background. He suddenly saw how he would not live forever; and he wished to adjust his life before he died.

  Payne took to his room and napped unhappily until evening. He woke up thinking of how he had camped one night on the Continental Divide and pissed with care into the Atlantic watershed. Now he wasn’t sure he should have. He tried to imagine he was saying toodleoo to a declining snivelization; and howdy to a warwhoop intelligentsia of redskin possibility with Ann as a vague Cheyenne succubus—the complete buckskin treatment.

  But under his window, attendants drifted in a Stone-henge of gas pumps. Fill er up! America seemed to say. A blue, gleaming shaft descended cleanly under the grease rack and a Toyota Corona shot off into the Montana night. Hey! Your Gold Bell Gift Stamps! Poised against the distant, visible mountains, the attendants stood by a rainbow undulance of Marfak.

  All the windows were open to the cool high-altitude evening; under the blanket of his rented bed, Payne had the sudden conviction that he was locked in one of the umbral snotlockers of America. On the pine wall overhead, a Great Falls Beer calendar with Charles Remington reproductions of wolves, buffalo and lonesome cowpokes who tried to establish that with their used-up eyes and plumb-tuckered horses they were entitled to the continent. George Washington had tried the same thing: Throwing coins across a river, he had glommed America from the English. Payne could even understand how, in the early days, Indians, oriented to turkeys and pumpkins, were depleted by unfired blunderbusses, sailboats, maps. Just as Payne felt macadam and bank accounts depriving him of his paramour.

  It had been, he felt, another migraine spring. He sat up and bit into an apple, a handsome, cold Northern Spy; blood on the white meat; teeth going bad; tartar; sign of the lower orders; drop them at the dentist; refurbish those now you.

  Sleep.

  C. J. Clovis, former fat man and entrepreneur of large scale “gadgets” of considerable cost and profit to himself, sat in his Dodge Motor Home, easing a clear lubricant into the bright steel nipple on the upper articulation of his appliance. He smiled admiringly at the machined bevels at its “knee” and saw the little quarter-arcs of ballbearing brighten with oil. Laced neatly to the aluminum foot, with its own argyle, a well-made blucher seemed quite at home.

  The built-in television murmured before him: the Johnny Carson show. Clovis flicked it off and rolled out two blueprints on the dining table, weighting the corners with heavy coins of some foreign curr
ency which he produced from his pockets. The plans depicted a model of a bat tower which Clovis would build for America; modern, total engineering of bat enclaves, toward a reduction of noxious insects in the land. On the prints, the handsomeness of the structures was not hidden; they arose with loftiness from formed concrete piers and had stylish shake-shingle roofs surmounting three tiers of perforations through which the bats could enter. The floor plan, if that is what it must be called, was based loosely on the great temple of Mehantapec in the Guatemalan highlands. That is, the “monks” in this case, bats, dwelt in individual but linked sequences of cells roughly oblong in cross section, each of which debouched into a central chute or shit-scuttle; the accumulation, a valuable fertilizer, could be sold to amortize the tower itself.

  The bat tower involved sixteen hundred dollars in materials and labor. Clovis had slapped a price tag of eight thou on the completed item; and considered himself prepared to be beaten down to five. Not lower. Not in a land where mosquitoes carried encephalitis. Next a note to Payne who had been reamed and would not serve: offering him a position as crew boss in an operation dealing in the erection of certain pest control structures, a highly engineered class of dealie. No holds barred financially. Need aggressive young man with eye on main chance. Address me Clovis/Batworks, poste restante, Farrow, North Dakota. All the best.

  Clovis worked his way toward the stern and made himself a nightcap: eleven fingers of rye in a rootbeer mug, and adjourned to the toilet for a rapid salvo; a fascinating device, the machine used flame to destroy the excrement. Clovis stood in now slow-witted eleven-finger wonder as the little soldiers accepted the judgment of fire. Like toasted marshmallows holding hands, they became simple shadows and disappeared.

  The instant before he fell asleep in the comfortable double bed, he commenced to feel sad. C. J. Clovis had every right to believe, as he did, that it was no fun to be shaped like a corncrib under a tarpaulin and to have only one leg. He was already sick of the appliance. He looked out of the high laminated window to Sagittarius on the close night sky feeling the ache of tear ducts under his eyeballs; and thought, soon it will come.…

  In the early morning, under Payne’s window, no one moves at all. All along the curb, cars, pick-ups and stake trucks are angled in. The street is dusty in front of rolled awnings, conventional stores in a region where Montgomery Ward sells roping saddles. The Absarokas tower at the south end of Main Street; east of town a fish in whitewashed stones decorates a snuff-colored mountainside, its dorsal exaggerated where children walked too far with their rocks.

  At this very moment, Payne should have been seeing Ann. Was it that he feared arrest?

  Some time ago, when Payne and Ann had first met and been so interested in one another, Ann went to Spain with one George Russell, a young associate of her father’s. She had in Ann Arbor developed a reaction to the ineffectual group of bridge-playing bohemians who hung around the Union and with whom she, as an artiste, spent her time. George, who at least seemed decisive as her new friend Payne did not, convinced her to make the trip. Unlike the bridge players, she thought, George was the kind who could receive and transfer power, big G.M. power. Nevertheless, her societal notions were such that she could, despite her infatuation with Payne, conduct a trial run for her European trip, with George, in a Detroit hotel. As far as Ann was concerned, it was just barely okay. George’s fiscal acumen was not matched in his bedroom performances. He seemed weirdly unsuitable.

  Parenthetically, it was Payne’s upset that impelled his first cross-country motorcycle trip. Her departure made him reckless enough that he overworked the motorcycle and blew a primary chain outside Monroe, Michigan (home of George Armstrong Custer, who went West) at seventy miles an hour; and locked both wheels. He went into a long lazy succession of cosine curves before buying the farm altogether in a burst of dirt and asphalt followed by three shapely fountains of gravel; the last of which darkled the fallen cyclist’s features for only a single instant of that year. No serious injury ensued; just a lot of mortifying road burn. Nine days later, he hightailed it for the Coast.

  Thinking of Ann organized Payne’s effort; any enlightenment proceeding from the present freedom of his condition, however irresponsible that freedom may have seemed, would finally devolve happily upon their connubial joys. He would tell her about all his wild days. He would tell her about his motorcycle in the mountains, the blue sheen of Utah glare ice when he rode down the west slope of the Uinta Mountains to fine snowless towns lurid with cold; about eating bloodwurst sandwiches for the three days he was camped in the Escalante Desert and up on the Aquarius Plateau. He would make little mention of the cutie he dogged repeatedly at the entrance of his Eddie Bauer nylon and polyvinyl expeditionary tent whose international burnt-orange signal color brought the attention of a big game hunter down in the timber who watched the fleering fuckery in his 8X32 Leitz Trinovids. The same girl who bought him the Floyd Collins Lilac Brilliantine to hold his hair down on the bike, showed him some American Space outside of Elko, Nevada, in the bushes near a railroad spur. She liked him to tell her he was a hundred-proof fool who was born standing up and talking back. It had been a beauty autumn with falcons jumping off fence posts like little suicides only to fly away; an autumn of Dunlop K70 racing tires surrounding chromium spokes that made small glittering starscapes in the night. “I’ll take a car any day,” she had said. “You cain’t play the radio own this.”

  To see Ann now, well, never mind. I’m fundless. I want to be demeaned by postal money orders. Kiss me. I’m not one of your deadbeats.

  A stake truck made a huge, pluming trail of dust coming West from the Boulder River. The dust washed out sideways on the scrub pine, rose high behind the truck and turned red in the early morning sun. Payne had nothing to play his Django Reinhardt records on.

  He thought of the two of them becoming one and didn’t like the idea. The shadow of the Waring Blender. Short of sheer conjugality, he didn’t see why that would be any better than the billiard collisions that marked their erratic, years-long circling of one another.

  If only he could see her. That was the thing. Not an idea. A thing of a certain weight. They would wander through the bones of an old buffalo jump, picking up flakes of jasper and obsidian, pausing now and again for that primordial rhumba known to all men. She would have a Victrola for his Django Reinhardt records. They would lurch and twitch from the dawnlit foothills to the sweet sunset-shattered finality of the high lonesome.

  Held in abeyance, the question of Clovis, whose letter, queerly put, suggested to Payne a chance of productive movement, a set of brackets for this other. But to respond to Clovis’ offer frightened him a little, like jumping a train, not for what it vouchsafed immediately; but for what it threatened in the long run. Once started, how stop? How does the foreman of a pest control project retire?

  He wrote to Clovis and said, I’m your man; come get me. I have an operating radius of fifty miles, a need of: clean sheets, alcoholic beverages in reasonable quantities, harmless drugs, one Tek natural-bristle toothbrush with rubber gum massager, sufficient monies to clean or fix four pair Levis, four gaudy cowboy shirts, eight pair army socks, one Filson waterproof coat, one down-filled vest, one sleeping bag in the shape of a mummy, one pair Vibram-sole hiking boots, one pair Nocona Elegante boots with bulldogging heels and stovepipe tops, one scarf by Emilio Pucci, one pair artilleryman’s mittens with independent triggerfinger and one After Six tuxedo.

  He accepted, in other words, Clovis’ offer with a sense that with the addition of this job to his routine, his life could be reconstituted like frozen orange juice.

  Implacably, he would bring himself to Ann’s attention in a way that reached beyond mere argument and calling of the police.

  He would become a legend.

  6

  It is five o’clock in the morning of the Fourth of July on the fairgrounds at Livingston, Montana.

  The day before, Payne sat in the grandstands in unholy fascination as Tony
Haberer of Muleshoe, Texas, turned in a ride on a bucking horse that Payne felt was comparable to the perfect faenas of El Viti he had seen at the Plaza Mayor. One moment, stilled in his mind now, Haberer standing in the stirrups, the horse’s head between his feet, the hind feet high over Haberer’s head, Haberer’s spine curved gracefully back from the waist, his left hand high in the air and as composed as the twenty-dollar Stetson straw at rest on his head: a series of these, sometimes reversed with the horse on its hind legs shimmying in the air, spurs making electric contact with the shoulders of the outlaw horse, then down, then up, then down until the time is blown from the judge’s stand and the horse is arcing across the sand in a crazy gallop; a pick-up rider is alongside the bucking, lunatic animal, the bronc rider reaches arms to him and unseats himself, glides alongside the other horse—the outlaw bucking still in wild empty-saddle arcs by itself—and lands on his feet to: instant slow motion. Haberer crosses to the bronc chute with perfect composure; lanolin-treated goatskin gloves, one finger touches the brim up of the perfect pale Stetson with the towering crown; the shirt blouses elegantly in folds of bruised plum; faded overlong Levi’s drop to scimitar boots that are clouded with inset leather butterflies. Payne sweats all over: Make it me!

  But at five o’clock in the morning of the Fourth of July in the arena of the Livingston, Montana, fairgrounds, one day after Haberer rode, Payne crouched in a starting position in the calf chute. In the next chute, his quarter horse backed to the boards, Jim Dale Bohleen, a calf roper from the sandhills of West Nebraska, slid the honda up his rope and made a loop. He swung the loop two times around his head, flipped it forward in an elongated parabola and roped the front gate post; then, throwing a hump down the rope, he jumped the loop off the post, retrieved his rope, made his loop again, hung its circularity beside him with the back of the loop held tight under his elbow, leaned way forward over the saddle horn, his ass against the cantle and his spurs back alongside the flank strap. “Any time you are,” he said to Payne.