The Bushwacked Piano Read online

  Missus Fitzgerald’s voice came from behind him. “Who are you?”

  Payne turned, stood, smiled. Her face was more delicate than a casserole.

  “GET OUT”

  When sophisticated or wealthy women get angry, they attempt to make their faces look like skulls. Missus Fitzgerald did this and looked awfully like a jack-o-lantern. She was that fat.

  Payne offered to explain.

  “GET OUT!” She just said that. “HE’S IN OUR HOUSE!” she added, taking credit for a discovery that was not hers.

  “I can—”

  “NO!”

  “I can—”

  “NO!”

  “No, what?”

  “YOU CAN’T … YOU HAVE TO GET OUT!”

  Somewhere along in here she began scoring heavily with a plumber’s friend with which she belabored Payne. He shielded himself and sought protection behind the hampers. “You’ve got crime written all over you,” she panted. He seized the plumber’s friend, suppressed an itch to beat the living piss out of her with it. Fitzgerald arrived, having allowed a leisurely ripening of the scene.

  “You jerk,” said Fitzgerald, “you didn’t know when a favor had been done for you.” He chuckled grimly to himself. “Do you realize,” he asked, “that when the Second World War was raging and Hitler was riding high that I was the squash champion of the Detroit Athletic Club?” This stopped everything.”

  “What has that got to do with anything!” his wife, Edna, wailed. Fitzgerald started into a long song and dance about the kind of guy he was. And though there was considerable poignancy in his latest fatuity, its effect was to shatter Missus Fitzgerald’s primitive stagecraft of shrieks and accusations.

  “Ann!” Payne bellowed after some thought, trying to bring things to life. He caught the right note; because Fitzgerald lunged to shut him up. But Payne could not mistake the sound of her skittering descent of the stairs, one hand on the rail, the which seemed to last an eternity.

  As she appeared, he commenced cowering before her parents. They melted under her glare. Payne saw her, his spirit twining and tautening. Before him, the one true. They smiled amid the total inutility of this bug scuffle. Discreetly, Ann recorded everything with her camera, including a final blow with the plunger.

  “Neutral corners,” cried Fitzgerald.

  “Are we not ever to be safe?” inquired his wife. Payne quietly turned the washing machine on again.

  “I can explain everything,” he said with sudden blind joy.

  “We don’t want to hear!”

  “Maybe you should,” Ann said, her voice a saffron buffalo trotting to Jerusalem with a pony express mailbag of loving hellos. “Maybe you ought to.”

  “Are we not ever to be safe from the depredations of this criminal?”

  “Edna,” said Fitzgerald in the plainsong of common sense.

  “Never?” A minute fissure had appeared in her voice.

  “Edna,” Payne said.

  “I want someone to tell me,” she said with a noble, judicial mien—as though her voice was making an independent threat to cry—“I’m prepared to make other arrangements with my own life if we are to be repeatedly and casually displaced by the depredations of this hoodlum … Catholic criminal type.”

  “Oh, now Edna.”

  “I’m a backslider,” said Payne. “There’s many an empty day between me and my last novena.”

  “I have my wig bank, as silly as that may sound. But there is work for me.”

  “No, no, no. Payne will be gone. You’ll see.”

  A flash of hatred as can only be produced by an inconvenienced businessman arced from Fitzgerald’s eyes to those of Payne. Payne wanted so much to have a showdown; but he knew it would come to nothing with Ann. It was part of her style to present herself as an integral part of a noble family package.

  On the other hand, when her father took Payne by the throat and attempted to strangle him, it was Ann who tore free his hands.

  This was another mistake for Fitzgerald; its unseemliness even drove his wife from the room. She went out saying she no longer saw how it would be possible to inhabit this ranch.

  “This hasn’t been a satisfactory show,” tried Fitzgerald, winningly, “on the part of the Missus and myself.”

  “Frankly, the part with the toilet plunger left me cold.” It had become difficult to be heard over the washing machine. It shuddered and wobbled in a steam-laden surge. Engine-driven, Payne imagined, it whirled a sacred cargo of Ann’s little things.

  “Daddy,” Ann said, “it’s too late for this kind of … protection.”

  “It’s hard to face that, honey.”

  “But you must.”

  “I know that darling. I see that too. We never interfered much before, did we? Before Payne broke into the house? Did we darling? And bombarded Mom with filth when she found him in the library? Did we? But, kids, try and see it my way, huh? Nick here screaming that Mom’s head wouldn’t draw flies at a raree show—that’s not good, is it kids? Or is this a generation deal?”

  “Can we leave the laundry room?” Payne enquired.

  “Let me just say this,” Duke Fitzgerald went on. “Ann, do as you wish. We’ll honor whatever you decide. And Mom will back me up. I promise.”

  “I don’t know what I wish!”

  “Ann—”

  “I don’t know, Daddy!” Ann didn’t want to pair off. She wanted to play in her room with all the junk for a few more years. Fitzgerald, the ghoul, saw it.

  “I mean, look, do you want to get married?”

  “No one said that,” Ann said. Payne was grievously pained. Fitzgerald raised his palms up, both of them to one side of his face in a gesture of assured noninterference.

  “You wanna set up house, I’ll get outa the way.” Fitzgerald could have had the ball game then and there; but a sudden vision of a house without Ann in it, and of his wife charging in with a fistful of ballpoint pens, made him pull back. He lacked—at that moment anyway—an essential killer’s instinct.

  But Fitzgerald had shown his right, even in this incomplete thrust, to a room at the top. Now he wanted to round things out. “Nick, there’s room here for you. Ann’ll tell you when we eat.” Even that took some restraint. Fitzgerald wanted to promise Payne that if he turned his back it was going to be angel choirs long before he thought he’d ever see them.

  “Fine,” Payne said, nodding graciously.

  “Okay, kid. We’ve got a deal.”

  Fitzgerald went to the door and took its handle. He let his head drop a little without turning to look at them. “G’night, Annie,” he said thickly and went out.

  When he had gone, Ann said, “He never called me Annie before.”

  Payne seized her. They grappled lovingly among the hampers. A famous man says that we go through life with “a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms”; and these, these, these children, these these these these little children will soon not be able to feel this way about anything again.

  12

  Wayne Codd eased the bunkhouse door shut behind himself and made his way across the open drive to where Payne was unloading a couple of low, tatty, catchall suitcases. It was not in the least the kind of luggage Codd associated with top-level arrivals at Gallatin Field in Bozeman. The fourteen-carat buckaroos from Dude City Central Casting that poured out of those Northwest Orient Fan Jet Electras didn’t go around with deal luggage of that sorry order. It reassured him.

  Then the haircut. You couldn’t see the bastard’s ears. Codd wanted to go up and flat tell Payne that red white and blue were colors that didn’t run. Instead, he took the time to estimate Payne as though he were a chine of beef; and he came up with the dispiriting intelligence that Payne was on the big side. Furthermore, he was throwing gear around the back of the wagon in a way that reminded Codd, by special paranoid telepathy, of himself being abused at some future time. He walked over.

  “Nice day,” Codd said.

  “Yes it is.” Payne rolled an Indian blanke
t and packed it beside the camp stove in the front of the wagon.

  “Been sure hot.”

  “Yes it has.”

  “You workin here naow?”

  “Just visiting.” He climbed out of the wagon. “I work with another fellow. I guess I’ll be staying here a bit though.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “About how long?”

  “I surely couldn’t tell you.” Payne introduced himself and they shook hands.

  “You’re not workin here then, ay?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re not figurin on workin.”

  “Why? Do you work here?”

  “That’s right, friend.”

  “You sound like a man with a situation to himself,” Payne declared.

  “I am,” Codd said. “I expect to keep it that way.”

  “Well, it is nice to be able to lay back without anybody cracking the whip when you do.”

  “Yeah, only I don’t do that.”

  “That’s even more wonderful.”

  “I wasn’t callin it wonderful,” Codd said.

  “Well, that’s even more whatever you’ve been finding yourself calling it.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Look,” Payne said, “you were the one that came over and talked to me.”

  “That’s so. I was.”

  “Are you the foreman here?”

  “Correct.”

  “Got anything to do right now?”

  “Nothin.”

  “In that event,” Payne said, “why don’t you buzz back to the bunkhouse and let me get on with the job.”

  Fitzgerald leaned out of an upper window.

  “Wayne, give Nick a hand there if he needs you.”

  “Run all those suitcases up to the guest room,” Payne said, fishing for a cigar in his shirt pocket. “I’ll be playing foreman over here at the foot of this tree.”

  Codd put a forefinger into Payne’s chest, prefatory to making a remark of some kind. Payne spoiled his preparation by slapping his hand halfway around his back, establishing specific personal limits.

  He lit his cigar and retired to the shade at the foot of the cottonwood. Codd disappeared into the entrance of the house. Fitzgerald smiled overhead … at what?

  Payne lifted the wagon tongue off the wagon hitch and put his back into moving the son of a bitch under the trees by the tack room where it would be inconspicuous. He planned to use his considerable handiness in helping everyone at the ranch. Then they would all be happy and like one another. Thinking of Ann, of the ranch, of his happiness and good work under the mountains and sunshine, he sings:

  All around the world

  I’ve got blisters on my feet,

  Trying to find my baby

  And bring her home to me!

  With a toothpick in my hand

  I’d dig a ten-foot ditch!

  And run through the jungle

  Fighting lions with a switch!

  Because you know I love you baby!

  Yes you know I love you baby!

  Whoa-oh you know I love you baby!

  Well, if I don’t love you baby:

  GRITS AND GROCERIES!

  EGGS AND POULTRIES!

  AND MONA LISA WAS A MAN!

  Ten hours and fourteen and a half minutes earlier, C. J. Clovis had come out of surgery for the removal of his left arm which had been rendered useless and dangerous by a total closure of circulation and the beginnings of gangrene. Whether or not his doctors had been precipitous in the removal of the limb remained to be argued. In any case, they had consulted with his physicians in Michigan, including the singular young surgeon to whom had fallen the unlikable task that ended with lugging the heavy left leg of Clovis across the operating theater to the stainless bin; where it was discarded like tainted meat—which, presumably, it was. As with the amputated leg, the arm, discarded, had shown the baleful, zigzag incisions as though the work had been done with pinking shears.

  It took Payne hours to find him in the empty hospital ward, where he rested on that particular fine summer’s day. Payne, worse than useless, permitted tears to stream down his cheeks, until Clovis shouted, “Stop it! I may be a goner! Just stop that!”

  “I would have stayed up at Bangtail if I had known you were sick.”

  “I didn’t know I was either. This is one fucking mess.”

  “The doctor said this is the end of it. He said it’ll take some getting used to but this is the last thing that’s coming off.”

  “Don’t listen to them, Payne. They’ve scavenged me as it is. I don’t know where they’re going to stop!”

  “They already have stopped.”

  “But can’t you see! With their tin-can optimism they feel no responsibility to be accurate! They just don’t want scenes in their waiting rooms! Everybody’s going to be okay! And these buggers probably believe it, is the worst of it. They believe everything is going to be okay right up to the point the patient kicks off, then they switch to their famous doctor’s resignation in matters of life and death. When those fuckers start in like preachers about doing all that was humanly possible I want to kick their big soft white asses. I want to yell, ‘shove your humanly possible! You’re dismantling me! My arm is gone! My leg is gone! Now just give me a God damn schedule and I’ll know when you’re gonna haul off the rest of it!’ Here’s the kind of deal that floors you, Payne: Where is my arm at this minute?”

  After a while, Payne admitted he just didn’t know what to say.

  “Almost the worst part,” Clovis said, “is that I just got a contract for a Batrium.”

  Payne remembered the breakwater at home.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll build the … batrium.”

  “You don’t know how,” Clovis said, his face, unbelievably enough, lighting with ambition and greed.

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m so happy. I may as well say it. I am.”

  Payne sped away with a sense he hadn’t had since his paper route. The feeling of the last few days of no longer needing sleep was exaggerated at once.

  So, for the next two days, Payne lay upon his back in the top of that silo, in the infraheat of the pure high exposure enhanced by the warmth of fermentation below him. And he carefully nailed, coigned, wedged, butt-blocked, strong-backed, mitered and chamfered the passages of the Clovis Batrium, the sweat pouring out of him in a fog. Even pinch-face, the farmer, admitted that it was “crackerjack carpentry”; and there was no trouble collecting the payment in full which Payne delivered to a rather pleased multiple amputee in the Livingston clinic.

  Ann’s voice from the stairwell, sandy and musical at once, “Nicholas! Supper!”

  “Sit wherever you like,” said Missus Fitzgerald with cloying joy at Payne’s arrival. “Wherever.” Payne placed himself next to Ann. It was quite dark already; though a candelabrum of beeswax candles burned an octopus of light in the gloom. As everyone else arranged themselves, Fitzgerald at the serving dishes, Payne believed he saw, in the far end window, the face of Codd rise, gape and vanish.

  “Montana,” Missus Fitzgerald said in a heavy twang for the occasion, “is a fur piece from home.”

  “Anything here not suit you, Mister Payne?” said Fitzgerald.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you like to travel?” La Fitzgerald.

  “I do very much, thank you.”

  “And where have you been?”

  Payne named the places.

  La said she had been to all those and more.

  “Mother,” said Fitzgerald, “is a travel fiend.”

  “A travel what?”

  “Fiend.”

  “I began,” Missus Fitzgerald agreed, “as a young girl, traveling in Italy. The Italians in those days pinched the prettiest girls—”

  “Mussolini cleaned that particular clock,” said her husband.

  “And I,” Missus Fitzgerald said, “had to leave the country.”

  “I se
e,” said Payne, nervous.

  “A mass of tiny bruises.”

  “I uh see.”

  “Italy, this was Italy.”

  Payne had to comment.

  “It must have been a long time ago, Missus Fitzgerald,” he groped. The indelicacy of the remark was invisible to him, glaring to the others. Now, once again, Missus Fitzgerald hated his crime-ridden little guts.

  “Mother, Nicholas didn’t mean that.”

  “No,” said the Mum, “you wouldn’t suppose ordinarily.”

  Payne began to see it and, wordlessly, felt plumb stupid. He was quite unnerved by the situation. The last time they’d had him in the house … oh, well, what was the use. It was on everybody’s mind. King Kong takes a nosedive. A proclamation of emperor. Magister lewdy at the papal bullfights. Stalked through the house, a shotgun to the lip, a brandy for each ear. Mortal coils was the color of his vita. It was as simple as that.

  Payne looked at Ann, saddened that he was not always a man who was in his own driver’s seat. By flashes, she was enraged too that he lacked George’s polish. And Payne wondered: Will you care for me when I’m old? Will you fork over for two adults in the mezzanine when we hit the Saturday matinee? Or make me sit in the smoking loggia with my cheap cigar, bicycle clips on my pants legs and a card that reads: The U.S.A. social security props this potlicker up every morning. It is yer duty as a citizen to treat him like a Dutch uncle. Don’t make me get old, Mom. Remember me? The boy that wanted to skyrocket into eternity in a white linen suit that showed his deltoids? Don’t permit the years to tire him. But then. Well. Isn’t it really time that is the shit that hits everybody’s fan? Fess up, isn’t it? But Ann, to hold my hand when the others have gone and left me with words of foundationless criticism, after whole epochs, the two of us to face the final ditch spewing exalted thoughts like feathers from a slashed pillowcase. Wouldn’t that be a dream the regality of which would shut down the special-order department at Neiman-Marcus?

  “There,” Payne said with clarity. “I feel so much better.” They looked at him. He was suddenly blinded with embarrassment; and his mind slipped away, really slipped away. Past the far edge of the gravy boat, he perceived an Oscar Niemeyer condominium high in the cordillera of the Andes. An elderly Brazilian diplomat stood over a young Indian prostitute, a finger raised, his nose in a manual, saying, “Do that!”