The Bushwacked Piano Read online

  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.

  That is why Payne coming at the crack of dawn, rolling a herd of flat tires, pursuing the stragglers all over the highway, seemed unusual enough that the station owner helplessly moved a few imperceptible steps toward him in greeting. “Nice day.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Right in here with them uns. Blowouts is they?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see that now. I hope they can be saved.”

  “They’ll have to be.”

  The man worked furiously taking the tire off the rim of the first. “That’s one puncture!” There was a rattle; he fished around. “This tire has been shot!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man looked up bemused and went to the next tire.

  “What kind of recaps is these?”

  “Six-ply Firestone Town and Country. Self-cleaning tread.”

  “This here’s been shot too.”

  “Yup.”

  The man stood, turning his sweating forehead into the corner of his elbow. “I ain’t going no further.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that there has been a shooting here.”

  “I just want my damn tires fixed.”

  “Just fix em, heh, no querstions asked? Like ole Doctor Mudd fixing Booth’s leg? Let me ask you this. Have you ever read yer history? Let me ask you that.”

  “No.”

  “Let me give you a little background then.”

  “I don’t want any background. I want these tires fixed.”

  “I don’t move without an explanation.”

  The two men were desperate. Payne had nowhere else to turn. The station owner was dealing with his first customer in some time. Payne initiated the detente.

  “I shot them myself,” he said.

  “That’s all I needed to hear.” The man wiped his hands on a brick-colored rag. “In fact that’s just plain more like it.” He commenced putting a hot-patch on the first tire. “Honesty is the best policy,” he added.

  “Oh fuck you,” Payne inserted.

  “You can say that if you want now. I got no quarrel with you. But when you come in here and want me to start fixing what is plainly the results of a shooting why, you’re starting to eat in on my professional ethics.”

  “I’m going to start screaming.”

  “I am not going to a federal penitentiary in order to protect a dollar and a half’s worth of repair biness.”

  “I’m going to yell fire.”

  “What do these go to?”

  “They go to a Hudson Hornet.”

  The man finished and charged Payne three dollars. Payne told him he thought he had been protecting a dollar and a half’s worth of biness. “Rate went up,” said the man, “with complications of a legal nature.”

  “That Hornet,” he said, “was quite an automobile. Step down in if memory serves. Had quite an engine. Put your foot in the carb and she’d go apeshit to get off the line.”

  “Yeah only mine doesn’t go apeshit no matter where you put your foot.”

  “She get you over the road?”

  “Barely.”

  “That’s all you want,” said the owner, racking his mind for a pun about going over the road barely.

  “One day,” Payne said, fantasizing aggressively, “I’m going to have me a Ford Stepside pickup with the 390 engine and a four-speed box. I want a stereo tapedeck too with Tammy Wynette and Roy Acuff and Merle Haggard cartridges.”

  “Sure, but that engine. You crash the dude and it’s all she wrote.” The owner though had picked up on Payne’s fantasy. He wanted the same truck, the same stereo cartridges.

  “I want to put the cocksucker on 90. I want to go to British Columbia
. I want music on the way.”

  “You do have something there.”

  The station owner helped Payne take the tires out of the garage. Payne gave them a roll and the tires raced each other down the incline, peeled away and fell in overlapping parabolas to stop near the pumps. Payne rounded them up and got them all going at once, running and yipping around them like a lunatic. When one tried to streak away, he booted it back in line sternly.

  By the time he had ridden herd all the way back to the camp, he had named the four tires: Ethel, Jackie, Lady Bird—and Ann.

  It was good to have such spirits today. He had bluffs to call.

  11

  Somewhat experimentally, Ann let her hair hang out of the second story window. Black and rather ineffective against the logs, her beautiful, oval, foxlike face nonetheless glowed against the glassy space behind her.

  She retreated inside and began to clean up her room. Protractors, lenses, field guides, United States Geodetic Survey topographical maps, cores of half-eaten apples, every photograph of Dorothea Lange’s ever reproduced, tennis shorts, panties, a killing jar, a mounting board, fatuous novels, a book about theosophy, a bust of Ouspensky, a wad of cheap Piranesi prints, her diplomas and brassieres, her antique mousetraps, her dexamyl and librium tablets, her G-string, firecrackers, bocci balls and flagons, her Finnish wooden toothbrush, her Vitabath, her target pistol, parasol, moccasins, Pucci scarves, headstone rubbings, buffalo horns, elastic bandages, mushroom keys, sanitary napkins, monogram die for stationery, Elmer Fudd mask, exploding cigars, Skira art books, the stuffed burrowing owl, the stuffed, rough-legged hawk, the stuffed tanager, the stuffed penguin, the stuffed chicken, the plastic pomegranate, the plaster rattlesnake ashtray, the pictures of Payne sailing, shooting, drinking, laughing, reading comics, the pictures of George smiling gently in a barrera seat at the Valencia Plaza de Toros, an annotated Story of O, the series of telephoto shots of her mother and father duking it out beside the old barge canal in Washington, D. C., Payne’s prep school varsity jacket, an English saddle, a lid of Panama Green, Charlie Chaplin’s unsuccessful autobiography, dolls, a poster from the movie Purple Noon, a menu from the Gallatoire restaurant, one from the Columbia in Tampa, one from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami and one from Joe Muer’s in Detroit, and one rolled skin from a reticulated python curled around the base of a stainless steel orbiting lamp from Sweden—in short, a lot of stuff lay wall to wall in a vast mess, upon which she threw herself with energy born of her separation from Nicholas Payne.

  Within all of her reflections pertaining to him, some in her fantastic style, some in her rational, there permeated the mood of impossibility. Rationally, she knew her training barred a love affair in extenso with a man who could describe himself as a cad, someone who had little enough esteem for the structure of her background, anthropologically speaking, to call her father “a jerk-off.” But in the back of her mind, a tiny voice told her that Payne was someone whose impossibilities could be adapted to expand her spiritual resources. Nothing happened she couldn’t outgrow; but what bothered a little—sometimes—was that Nicholas, through some total romantic frangibility, didn’t have quite the same resilience. His emotional losses had a way of turning out to be real ones. It was like in books and made her jealous.

  Here, in a funny way, a considerable moral precision was seen in Ann; and it was a faculty that refracted from quite another part of her than that which had her hang her head from the window, hair against logs. And stranger still, it was this part, not the Rapunzel, which made her once so limp with love for Payne, the cad, Pecos Bill; that put her under such a spell that to see him at all would be to cut her moorings forever on a risk no one was recommending.

  She read somewhere that love was an exaggeration that only led to others; and she seized on the notion. She wanted a subtler scale of emotions than it offered. She was exhausted by the bruising alternation from ecstasy to despair. For someone who believed she might have been an honest-to-God intellectual, it was humiliating. During that first winter, she and Nicholas would walk on the Lake Erie shore making plenty sure that the desolating wave wrack of human debris didn’t touch their feet; involved either in total spiritual merger or agonizing disharmony; remembering it now, she could only think of the lurid, metallic sunsets, the arcs of freighter smoke and the brown tired line of Canada beyond.

  And, too, these alternations had a certain cosmic niftiness, a Heathcliff and Cathy finality that gave her a sense of their importance. And the secrecy was good. No one knew they were down in his boat copulating in the rope bunk, night after night. No one knew they launched citizens of their own to the condom-city that had been triangulated between Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit. No one knew that they had chipped in and sent the Mother Superior at Payne’s grade school a tantalizing nightie from Frederick’s of Hollywood with the note, “To a real Mother Superior!” No one knew, despite Payne’s opposition to Lozenge, that she felt transcendentally affixed to every day that passed for an entire winter.

  Now, from a handy tree in central Montana, Wayne Codd watched Ann fall upon her bed in the debris-filled room to weep wretchedly, spasmodically. What a sight! He put the binoculars down from his eyes, having banished a rather piddling inclination to self-abuse. The hell with it. They was work to do. He felt the imperial blue of the West form in his eyes. He felt the virile prominence of the cowboy in the mythographical ecosystem of America. Like a sleek and muscular hyena, he knew the expendability of chumps and those who weep, that the predators, the eagles of humanity, might soar. He shinnied down ready for ranching. He hadn’t cried since he was a child.

  For Missus Fitzgerald, the handwriting on the wall was about to appear as a lurching mechanical hysteria which took—in this incarnation—the form of a Hudson Hornet.

  For Payne, driving along and listening to the livestock reports—“These fat steers is dollaring up awful good”—it was not as easy as it looked; a vast fungo-bat of reality seemed to await him in the Shields Valley; to be precise, in the vicinity of the Double Tepee or Squaw Tits Ranch. But it would do to say in his favor that the old fidgeting approach, the old obliquity, was gone. No, frightened as he might be, he would arrive head-on.

  Little comfort derived from the slumbrous heat of the day. It was a flyblown hot summer to begin with; but this bluebottle extravaganza of shimmering terrain didn’t seem like anything you would call Montana. The animals were running crazy and dead game was all over the highway. The creeks were trickles. Their trout hid in springs and cutbanks. A long mountain bluff ended on the side of the road, the merest tongue tip of a yawning universe.

  As he drove, he had a bird’s-eye view of his own terror. High, high above the mountain West, Payne saw an automobilicule, microscopic, green, creeping up a hairline valley between wen-size mountains. The driver was too small to be seen. The horizon was curved like a boomerang. Payne “chuckled goodnaturedly” at the tiny driver you couldn’t even see who thought his fear saturated everything down to the Pre-Cambrian core. How naughty!

  God the Father was out here somewhere; as to the Holy Spirit, he merely whirled quietly in a culvert, unseen by anyone.

  Payne turned the radio dial irritably, getting only British rock music. It maddened him. What a smutty little country England had become, exporting all its Cro-Magnon song dodos, its mimsy, velveteen artistes. Payne wanted Richie Valens or Carl Perkins, and now.

  Missus Fitzgerald, trying to make up for snippish words and a recent attack involving ballpoint pens, made with her own red hands a rich cassolette of duck and pork and lamb and beans. With her great Parisian balloon whisk she beat a pudding in an enormous tin-lined copper bowl; and set it—trembling—on the drainboard.

  Payne lifted the front gate and swung it aside, stepping carefully across the cattle guard. His hands were trembling. He drove the car through, got out and closed the gate behind himself.

  Along the road to the ranch buildings, a small fast stream ran, much diminished, and where it made turns were broad w
ashes of gravel from the spring run-off. Scrub willow grew here, and on the cliffbanks were the holes of swallows. Then came the mixed woodland that Payne could not have known was the last stretch of geography between himself and the house. That it was composed of larch, native grass and bull pine held no interest for him. He had to go to the bathroom quite a lot. A relatively small band of pure American space seemed to throw a step-over-toe-hold on his gizzard.

  Payne made no attempt to lighten his tread on the porch and, before thought, gave the door a good pounding. Mister and Missus Fitzgerald opened the door together stretching their arms to him, paternally and maternally. In the long warmly lit corridor Ann stood shyly murmuring “darling.” They took him inside, warming him with their bodies; everyone, it seemed, tried to hold his hand. “May we call you son?” Ann cried with happiness. They leaped to each other, kissed with youthful passion, held each other at arm’s length. “At last!” A beaming, lusty preacher moved forward as though on a trolley, supporting a Bible with one hand and resting the other on top of it.

  Payne made no attempt to lighten his tread on the porch and, before thought, gave the door a good pounding. He heard someone move and was afraid. Frequent nerve farts troubled the silence. He thought: Windex, buffalo, Zaragoza. He knocked once more and the door behind the little grate opened at eye level. Nary a sound was heard. He knocked again, stood quietly and knocked once more. A weary voice, that of Mister Fitzgerald, was heard from the grill. “I hear you, I hear you. I’m just trying to think what to do about you.”

  “Let me in.”

  The door opened suddenly. “Right you are,” said Fitzgerald. “God help us.” He shut the door. “Follow me.” Fitzgerald pulled him into the hallway. Payne followed him down to a small utility room. “Stay here.” Fitzgerald left.

  Payne stood very nearly without motion for ten or fifteen minutes. Nothing. The washing machine stopped and a few minutes later the dryer, which also had been running, whirled to a stop. Payne idly opened the washing machine and saw the still wet clothes pressed centrifugally to the walls of its tumbler. The door opened behind him.