Nothing but Blue Skies

1

Frank Copenhaver put his wife Gracie’s suitcases in the back of the Electra and held the door for her. She got in. He walked around the front of the car gravely and he got in. He leaned forward over the steering wheel to look up at their house as though it were he, rather than Gracie, who was looking at it for the last time. A magpie flew across his view. It was a clue for Gracie in the event she didn’t realize that this was her chance. He didn’t want her, halfway to Arizona, to realize she had, in her sadness, forgotten to do this very important thing.

Once they were under way, he said, “We’ve got a few extra minutes, let me take the scenic route.”

“Oh, Frank, oh, please God no, not the scenic route,” said Gracie.

He was undeterred. As he drove, he chatted easily about the clash between Kellogg and General Mills over the seven-and-a-half-billion-dollar cereal business, realizing too late that it might seem to be an attempt to prefigure their own impending divorce and settlement. He tried to be almost too specific in fending off this parallel, running on about Cheerios and Wheaties and Rice Krispies and Raisin Bran; and, considering the state of their own lives, making far too much of Tony the Tiger autographing baseballs at Safeway stores.

Grade was dressed for travel, jeans, a cotton sweater tied around her waist, tennis shoes; her long black hair was braided and wound atop her head. She was at once weathered and pretty, remarkably girlish for the mother of a college student. She was wearing mountaineering glasses with leather side pieces. She didn’t seem to see much of the ordinary suburb and barely tightened her focus when Frank stopped in front of his — their — medical clinic on Alder Street and watched in apparent satisfaction as patients wandered in and out of its breezy, modern entryway. They had not owned the clinic long, and the many nursery aspens were still held up by stakes and wires; the beds of annuals had an uncanny uniformity. Frank took one more turn so that he could see the building from the side, then went on to the Kid Royale, his pet project.

The Kid Royale Hotel was a short walk from Deadrock’s old Territorial railroad station and was one of the monuments of the Montana frontier. Frank was going to restore it to its original glory, with its carriage bays and hitching racks and vaulted lobby. It was in poor shape now and stood with faded tobacco and soft drink advertisements painted on its side in a neighborhood that was giving way to transience and light industry. The success of this project would probably do more to endear Frank to this small city than anything. And it was only with the mildest of irony that he looked forward to his acceptance.

“Can we skip the mini-storage?” Gracie asked. “It’s getting late.” Frank was able to include the mini-storage facility in the scenic tour despite Gracie leaning disconsolately against the side of the car.

“You know,” he said, “it’s hard to believe, but there’s some five percent adjustable mortgages out there. Sometimes I think my bank is trying to put me out of business. You can’t always absorb these little things just to be courteous, let people nick you when they want. Like today, the Nikkei stock index plunged under the effect of arbitrage-related selling. This crap skids around the Pacific Rim in about four nanoseconds and scares hell out of little guys in Montana like me. Gracie, I hate to see you go. It’s been what, exactly?”

“A long time.”

“A long time. But Grace, you should have never done what you did. People don’t rise above things like that. Their marriages don’t.”

“I know, Frank.” As they reached the airport behind a stream of cars looking for short-term parking, Frank suddenly felt wild and unacknowledged conflicts in his breast. He had not spent enough time thinking about what this moment could mean. There was something spinning loose.

“Gracie, I just know you’re going to hit the ground running.” The thought that that might actually be true renewed his malice. “I’m going to focus on my business. Our situation has been so anti-synergistic that, to be completely honest, I expect to take off like a rocket as soon as you’re gone.”

“I bet you’re right.”

“If you get a chance, I’d like to see you salt a few bucks away in tax-deferred variable annuities, but that’s between you and whoever.” “Whoever” was like a drooling new face at Mount Rushmore.

“Thanks.”

Frank managed to catch a skycap’s eye. The skycap, a boy of about eighteen with long hair falling out of his cap, came to the driver’s side window where Frank gave him several bills. “Give the lady a hand with her luggage if you would.” Then he turned to Gracie, who was getting out of the car. “Goodbye, Grace. Give my regards to a town of your choice.”

“Goodbye, Frank.” Her cheeks were wet with tears.

He pulled away with a bizarre, all-knowing expression on his face, his hands parallel on the wheel and feeling, as he glanced in the rearview mirror too late to see Gracie enter the airport, that something inside had come completely undone. There was no chance to analyze her gait and try to determine if she was eager to get on the plane. There was no chance to collapse with grief and, perhaps, start all over again.

He had really thought he was adjusting to a changed Gracie but not an entirely new one. They had two cars but they never went anywhere in two cars before. They picked one and both went in it together, either Gracie’s unkillable Plymouth Valiant with its smooth-ticking little slant six or his low, domineering blue-black Electra with the insouciant lag shifts of its fluid-swilling transmission. Often Gracie slid over near him like in high school, elevating slightly on the spheres of her buttocks to touch her hair into place in the rearview mirror or put her hand high on his thigh. The Buick seemed like an old-time sex car, and unlike the light-spirited Japanese cars that had come to dominate things, the Electra still seemed to say, You’re going with me and you’re going to put out, period. The wanton deep pleats of its velvety upholstery invited stains. Recently, however, Gracie had begun to take the Plymouth for “time to think” on her way to her restaurant, Amazing Grease — sometimes, it seemed to Frank, with plenty of time to think. She had promised she would learn how to fish so that they would have more time together, but that plan went sour. He was quick to notice that things had changed but slow to realize what should be done about it. He reminded himself that he still had his health.

Frank buried himself not in his work but in fantasies of escape. He became a connoisseur of maps. He loved the history of maps and he felt drawn to the theory of the flat earth as the only one that adequately explained the disappearances common to everyone, especially death. He saw a kind of poetry in the spherical projections of the world as devised by Ptolemy. The more insistently the mystery of Gracie’s changed patterns intruded upon his thoughts, the more interested he was in the shrinking terrae incognitae of the old world; flat or round, what was the difference? Really, he often thought, what is the damn difference? It just seems likely that my parents, like other generations, milled around for sixty-eighty years and fell off the end.

He bought a scale model of a nineteenth-century surveyor’s carriage and had booked a trip with Gracie’s travel agent friend, Lucy, to visit the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, home of the Greenwich meridian, about the time Gracie hit the road without a map of any kind. By this time, the impending change had elaborated into a full-fledged human by the name of Edward Ballantine, a traveler and breeder of race horses, a resident of Sedona, Arizona, spiritual headquarters for Shirley MacLaine’s crystal people. Suddenly, Galileo’s discovery of the satellites of Jupiter, Newton’s announcement that the earth was flattened at the poles, even his simple pleasure at reading the mileage tables in his gas station, were out the window. He had never really thought about his wife leaving him. She was gone and he would never be the same again. He would never have a single second of time that was in any way continuous with his previous life, even if she came back, which was not likely. What good was his map collection now?

In 1968, a now ancient time full of scathing situations, trying love but preferring lust and, for many, one meretricious scène à faire, the flushing of narcotics down the toilet, Frank was banished from the family business by his father. This involved a long autobiographical recitation in which his father told about his early years on the ranch, the formulaic (in Frank’s eyes) long walk to a poorly heated country school, the pain of being Catholic in a community of Norwegian Lutherans, the early success in getting calf weights up, the malt barley successes, the highest certifications and the prize ribbons, the sod farm successes, the nursery, the Ford dealership, the implement dealership and the four apartment buildings, including the one regularly demolished by the fraternity boys “and their concubines.” Frank’s father was a self-taught, almost bookish individual, and he wore his education on his sleeve.

Among the fraternity boys was Frank, the son of the landlord, who had graduated a year earlier but who was now “managing the building” for his family, hoping to make it another of the family’s successes. The occasion of his banishment was a theme party, the theme being Farm Life, a kind of witticism on Frank’s part involving hauling three tons of straw into the building and piling it higher than not only the furniture but the heads of the occupants. Barnyard animals, chiefly pigs, were turned loose in this lightless wilderness and the party began. It lasted two days. Tunnels quickly formed that led to the beer kegs and to small clearings where people could gather. There was a proscribed area for bodily functions, a circular clearing in the hay with dove gray shag carpet for a floor, and another for the operations of the stereo and its seemingly endless loop of the beloved Neil Young’s “Are you ready for the country, ’cause it’s time to go!”

The world of straw became damp and odorous with beer, marijuana, sperm, perfume and pig droppings. Frank would remember ever afterward the terror of crawling stoned, in his underwear, down a small side tunnel to meet headlong in the semi-darkness a bristling, frightened three-hundred-pound pig. Right after that, clutching a beer and a joint and hearing the approach of another pig, he withdrew into the straw alongside the tunnel to let the pig pass, watched it go by ridden by the most beautiful naked sorority girl he had ever seen, Janet Otergaard from Wolf Point, now vice president of the First National Bank. Frank crawled after her but fell behind a bit, and when he caught up she was already going off into the straw with Barry Danzig, who was home from Northwestern Law School. This disappointment had the effect of making Frank long for fresh air. He made his way toward the entrance, and crawling out of the straw in his underwear, a bleak and tarry roach hanging from one of his slack lips, he met his father.

Mr. Copenhaver continued to wear suspenders long after they had gone out of fashion. He wore wide ones with conspicuous brass hardware to remind people of his agricultural origins. Most people hadn’t gotten the news that farmers were as liable to be envy-driven crooks as anybody else, the stream of information having been interrupted by the Civil War; so, wearing wide suspenders was like wearing an “I Am Sincere” sign. Today, curving over the powerful chest of his father, they stood for all the nonsense he was not brooking. A bleary girl in a straw-flecked blue sweater emerged pulling the sweater down at the sides over her bare hips. She peered unwelcomingly at Frank’s father and said, “Who’s this one?”

“The owner of the building!” boomed Mr. Copenhaver. She dove back into the straw. Frank was now overpowered by fear of his father. He felt his drugged and drunken vagueness in muzzy contrast to his father’s forceful clarity next to him, a presence formed by a lifetime of unstinting forward movement, of farming, warfare and free-market capitalism as found in a small Montana city. Next to his father, Frank felt like a pudding. As against making a world, he was prepared to offer the quest for pussy and altered states — an edgeless generation, dedicated to escaping the self and inconsequential fornicating, dedicated to the idea of the Relationship and all-terrain shoes that didn’t lie to your feet. Frank’s fear was that his father would strike him. Worse, he said to get the people out, clean up the building and appear at his office in the morning.

That didn’t start out well either. He was exhausted from cleaning up the mess himself. His companions were unwilling to help until they had had a night’s sleep. He found himself shouting, on the verge of tears: “Is this friendship? You know my back is against the wall? I’m about to get my ass handed to me. I need you to help me!” We need sleep, they said. So, he cleaned the mess up himself, hauling twenty-seven loads in the back of his car out to the landfill and simply, hopelessly, releasing the pigs into the neighborhood. They belonged to the family of one of the fellows who hadn’t stayed to help. Frank found the most awful things on the floor: false teeth taped to the end of a stick, hot dogs and half-finished bags of miniature doughnuts dusted with powdered sugar, rotten panties, a Bible, a catcher’s chest protector. He showered, changed into a clean shirt, clean jeans and a corduroy sport jacket. Then, having been up all night, he headed for his father’s office. He drove up Assiniboine Avenue and then turned at College Street. His nerves were shattered by the sight of three of the pigs jogging up the center of Third Street, loosely glancing over their shoulders. Here and there, people stopped to watch these out-of-place animals.

He parked his car, an old blue Mercury with sarcastic tail fins and speckled bumpers, in front of his father’s office, a handsomely remodeled farmhouse on West Deadrock, and went in. He presented himself shakily to the secretary, the very Eileen who now worked for him, who waved him on with a gesture that suggested she knew all about people like Frank and his friends. And perhaps she did, he thought. It’s easy to detect motion when you’re frozen in position, an old hunter’s trick.

“Come in, Frank,” said his father evenly.

“Hi, Dad.”

His father stayed at his desk while Frank sank subdued into an upholstered chair placed in front of the desk, a chair so ill sprung that Frank, at six-one, was barely able to see over the front of his father’s desk. The view of his father’s head and neck rising from the horizontal line in front was reminiscent of a poorly lit documentary shot of a sea serpent and added to the state begun by Frank’s shattered condition.

Mr. Copenhaver made a steeple with his fingertips. The high color in his cheeks, the silver-and-sand hair combed straight across his forehead and the blue suit gave him an ecclesiastical look, and Frank felt a fleeting hope that this was no accident and Christian forgiveness lay just around the corner.

“Frank, you’re interested in so many things.” His father glanced down; Frank could see he had the desk drawer slightly open so that he could make out some notes he had made for this conversation.

“Yes, sir.”

“You like to hunt and fish.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You like the ladies. You like a high old time. You like to meet your buddies for a drink in the evening and you read our daily newspaper, indicating, I might have hoped, an interest in current events but probably only the ball scores. I rarely see you with anything uplifting in your hand bookwise and the few you’ve left around the place are the absolute utmost in prurience, illustrated with photographs for those who are unable to follow the very descriptive text. So far so good: at least it was confined between the covers of a book. There was a day in time when I had my own Tillie the Toiler comics and I am not here setting myself up to moralize about your condition. I have for a long time now, heaving a great sigh, accepted that I was the father of a drunken sports lecher and let it go at that. But when I gave you the opportunity to find some footing in the day-to-day world that would have implications for your livelihood many years down the road, you gave it the kind of disrespect I have to assume was directed at me. Last night, I felt personally smothered in straw and pig manure. That was your valentine to your father, Frank, thank you. And Frank, see how this flies: I’m not going to put up with it anymore. You’re not going to run that building anymore and my hope that you would one day manage the old home place is dead. I think your brother Mike is the man for that job.”

Mr. Copenhaver tipped back in his chair and began to talk about growing up on the old home place, the long walk to school, the cold, some parenthetical remarks about rural electrification and rural values. Frank tried to stare out the window but his eyes were too weak to get past the glass. He was cottonmouthed with exhaustion and prepared to endorse any negative view of his character. At the same time, he’d had enough. He got to his feet on his leaden legs and raised his hand, palm outward, to his father.

“Goodbye,” Frank said. He went out the door and rarely saw his father again. Mike saw him frequently, even driving down from the school of dentistry. They had a nice, even relationship that Frank envied. Mike never made an attempt to be a businessman like his father. That, much later, would be Frank’s job, seeking approval from someone who had departed this world for the refrigerated shadows of death.