Nothing but Blue Skies

15

Frank stopped by Dick Hoiness’s insurance office and asked him to join him for a drink. It seemed to be a wonderfully burgeoning insurance world in there, with all sorts of things pressed into service to hold down papers, even rocks. There were two secretaries on suave gray rolling chairs faced in opposite directions, operating computers. Dick got the jacket of his seersucker suit off the coatrack in the corner of his office. He was watching Frank quizzically. Frank had known for some time that he was going slightly downhill since Gracie’s departure, but this odd gaze from Hoiness confirmed it.

“Man, it’s ten A.M.,” said Dick. “Can I join you for something other than a drink?”

“No, this is more of a drink situation. You’re going to have to roll with me on this one.”

They drove back to the Dexter Hotel and went into the Meadowlark Bar with the Art Deco aluminum cocktail silhouette in front.

“Is this important?” he asked.

“Important.”

“Do I have to drink?”

“Yes.”

They had the bar to themselves. At such an hour, even the bartender viewed one with suspicion, barely accepting that in hard times problem drinkers help make ends meet. The light was dim, designed really for chatting up the opposite sex; but at this hour it seemed just gloomy.

“Let’s sit in a booth,” Frank said.

The bartender rolled his eyes. They each ordered a beer. Dick gathered his toward himself on the tabletop without actually taking a drink from it. He still had a kind of nocturnal demeanor from his rock-and-roll days. Frank looked at this well-adjusted insurance man and remembered him calling out over the top of reaching hands and transported faces, “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels!” with a death grip on the bucking neck of his guitar. Long time ago.

“I don’t know why I had to tell you this,” Frank said, “but I’ve accumulated a good many things and you’ve got them insured and I just had to tell someone that I am not enjoying any of this, including the accumulations, and it’s probably because I haven’t gotten over Gracie.” Hoiness looked at him in astonishment; it confirmed Frank’s sense that he was coming adrift.

“You’re telling me this? I’m flattered you would think of me to tell this.”

“You’re in insurance. You deal in the values the world accepts or you’d be out of business. I pay you to insure things that are starting to have no value to me.”

“You’re not canceling …”

“No, I just need to have things spruced up so I can keep playing. I want to be a player. I don’t want to get benched just at the point I’m getting a few things done. I want to play my ass off. But does this ever happen? Do you get clients that say they don’t want things insured until they rediscover their meaning?”

“No.”

“You don’t? It’s worse than I think.”

“I’m not saying that …” Hoiness lifted his hands in confusion. “I guess we all get the feeling we’re doing something wrong. It’s like walking alone through a store at an off hour, trying to act like you’re not shoplifting. In other words, your only choice is to go on about your business. How is your business?”

“My business is good,” Frank said. He didn’t mention any doubts he might have had.

“Now we’re businessmen,” Hoiness said.

“Yes.”

“How did it happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Frank. “The Theys have taken us in.”

“We’re pretty cozy. We’re one of them. I married a They — nice tits, mother of my kids, never seen me on drugs, never seen me with my dick through the back of a park bench waving to the nuns. It’s outa sight. It’s PTA.”

“We’re pretty cozy in here,” Frank mused, “right in the golden hearth of American life. We should thank our lucky stars.” Frank stared at the picture of the elk and the waterfall behind the bar. “I don’t want to get booted out of the hearth, Dick. I think it’s possible to appreciate it. I think you ought to be able to sit in front of your hearth even if you are all by yourself.”

Dick looked at him and said, “This is from the point of view of the committed life insurance salesman: I’ve noticed that people who lose the point of everything don’t seem to be around too much longer.”

“Said like a true They.”

Karl Hammersgard came in the door out of the blinding light, the sleeves of his blue oxford shirt rolled up, the pleated khakis straining around his midriff and rising slightly above the tops of his oxblood loafers. You could see the comb lines in his blond hair going straight back from his ruddy forehead. He was short and tough.

“Holy cow,” shouted Hoiness, “a real drunk!”

Hammersgard went to the bar and got a shot and glass of water without seeming to notice there was anyone in the place but him. He knocked back the shot, sipped the water, got the shot refilled and came to the table. He looked at Frank and Dick. “Ain’t that a pair to draw to,” he said.

“Join us, Karl,” said Frank.

“I thought I was the only day drinker in our group,” said Karl, sitting down.

“Normally you are,” Dick said, “but Frank’s not feeling too good.”

Karl raised his glass to Frank. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“The escalating boredom of life in the monoculture.”

“Good, Frank. Is that what this is?”

“Yeah,” said Frank, “like something you grew in a petri dish.” Then Frank didn’t feel particularly well. But it was hard to be solemn.

“So, what’s with you?” Hoiness asked him.

“Well, the usual. We’re four and oh.” Karl was the high school baseball coach. “So, I’m happy. We play Red Lodge tomorrow and they’re tough, or supposed to be tough. I’ve saved this one kid — pitches, unbelievable slider — for tomorrow. This kid is pure baseball. Being scouted already. It’s an away. I want to see him at that altitude. I think his stuff will absolutely shine. When you see this kid walk out there, it’s like seeing baseball itself, with a kind of glow. I’d like to put him in a glass case and suck out all the air. He’s that good. So, like I say, I’m happy, things is good.”

Frank looked at Karl. Karl was normal. Have a couple of shooters in the middle of the morning because they taste so good. No other reason. Big, life-loving Scandinavian brute. That’s what Frank hated about having a crooked personality — the weirdness, the glancing impulses, jokes going wrong, worldly mania one day and pining for a monastery by sunup the following. It was good to have companions like these, large mammals. In fact, overwhelmed by his love of them, Frank lustily ordered another drink.

The smoked glass of the barroom windows darkened rhythmically with the passing of pedestrians. The bartender went to his radio and turned on the livestock reports, which became the country music station, Hank Williams Jr. love marches and boasting.

“Turn that shit off,” yelled Karl, “or change it.”

“There ain’t a Norwegian station,” said the bartender.

“Jesus Christ,” said Karl, but the bartender changed it to something like background or elevator music.

“That we like,” said Karl in a firm voice. “And another round all the way around. These boys’ll take shots with their beer.” Frank and Dick tried to object but the drinks came and even seemed good, and they ordered the same thing again.

Frank was now at the end of the bar whirling with his right hand a rack of snack foods — ruffled potato chips, beef jerky, cheese popcorn. His left hand was deep in a three-gallon wide-mouth jar of pickled eggs. The pickling solution soaked into the sleeve of his jacket and he paused to feel the slippery eggs bumping into the back of his hand, never the front where he could grab them. “Hey, can’t catch these bastards,” he cried. He tried putting both hands in, but it made the juice slop out onto the bar. By the time he got an egg out, he had about ten of them in his hands and the bartender was watching him sharply. He went over to the booth, where Karl and Dick were forehead to forehead in a heated conversation about the Middle East.

“Who wants a pickled egg?” he called out. Hoiness waved him away without taking his eyes off the passionate explanations of Karl Hammersgard. This hurt Frank’s feelings and he thought of slugging Hoiness. He stood cradling the rubbery, strong-smelling eggs against his chest. “Well, then,” he said, “I don’t want them either.” He went back to the end of the bar and tossed them one after another with a splash into the jar.

The bartender was right in his face. “No egg?” he said.

“My eyes were bigger than my stomach.”

“You think it’s a good idea to handle them a lot, then toss them back in for the next customer?”

“Only a sucker would buy one of those eggs,” said Frank.

“You’re buying them all or you’re out.”

“Put them on the tab, Hal,” called Karl from the table. “Frank, get your ass back here and stop wandering around stirring things up.” Frank seemed to respond to this suggestion and trudged back to the table and sat down.

“What’s the subject? Still Middle East?”

“No,” said Hoiness, “the spotted owl.”

“Another round!” bayed Hammersgard. “Get in here and don’t act like you want to go out and face the world. Be a gentleman, even if it kills you.”

“The world is just an illusion anyway,” said Hoiness. Most of Frank’s friends were able to revert to hippies in a heartbeat. He knew plenty of middle-aged people ready and willing to discuss karma at any time.

“Not in Red Lodge it ain’t,” said Hammersgard. “They got one of the best defensive ball clubs in the state of Montana. They got a third baseman who’s like the Crest invisible shield. Nothing gets by this monkey. That’s why I’m fielding my man. When he turns his shit loose, the Red Lodge nine will make appointments with their optometrists.”

Frank leaned across the table and said, “My face is numb.”

“I’m close to hysteria,” said Hoiness. “I’ve got an appointment to sell a group plan to the cement plant in Belgrade. Before I sell them even one leetle premium, I’m gonna show them how the big boys puke.”

“Euphoric,” said Frank.

“How’s that?”

“Euphoric.”

“Oh, good, Frank,” said Dick, “that’s good.”

Four cowboys burst in the door. They were in high spirits, laughing even before they came in. The bartender checked the shortest one’s identification and the others ridiculed him and pointed out that Shorty didn’t need to shave because the cat could lick his beard off. In a moment, tall draft beers were arrayed before them.

“Kids,” said Hammersgard cheerfully.

“But loud,” said Frank.

“It’s part of their deal,” said Hoiness. “Frank, it’s normal.”

“Loud is?”

“Mm-hm.”

“How are you?” called one of the cowboys, a tall man with a rag tied around his neck.

“We’re fine,” said Karl.

“Why, that’s all right,” said the cowboy, turning back to drink with his fellows.

“What did he mean by that?” Frank said. “What’d you mean by that?” he called across to the cowboy. The cowboy put his beer down on the bar and came over to the booth. He wore a green flannel shirt and a belt buckle with some sort of animal head on it, a sheep or a goat.

“I guess I meant, how are you,” he said.

“Do we know you?”

“Frank, Frank,” said Dick.

“I’m not acquainted with Tex,” said Frank. “What difference is it to Tex how I am?”

“You need us over there?” called one of the cowboys at the bar.

“Not yet,” said the one at the table. “Just doin’ an attitude check here.”

“Let me save you some time,” said Frank. “The attitude is bad. I may cancel my insurance.” His head was full of clouds, the day, the misunderstanding, the drinks. “I may cancel your insurance,” he added in a ridiculously ominous tone.

“Let me help you to your feet,” the cowboy said, and reached across Karl to take Frank by the shirt. Karl roundhoused him onto the floor with such concussion, the three other cowboys had to more or less jump over their companion to reach Karl, Frank and Dick at the mouth of their booth. “Not again,” said Hoiness in a voice of despair; yet in pretending to rise to his feet, he was able to surprise one cowboy with a stomach butt and knock the wind out of him. Frank bent over the airless man sitting like Raggedy Andy and pressed him for his social security number. Frank was slugged solidly in the right ear, which removed his sense of humor instantly.

The bartender moved quietly to the phone, and the cowboy who had come to the table first, seeing this, slipped over to the farthest bar stool to feign quiet drinking. Karl charged the entire row of bar stools and the cowboy went down in a wilderness of chrome legs and red naugahyde. The front door parted just enough to flash in some sunlight and the prospective customer failed to enter. Gripping each other’s ears, Karl and the tall cowboy began a grim waltz down the center of the bar. Frank and his new acquaintance were silently trying to lift each other off the floor by the ears. Hoiness had succeeded in recognizing the smallest of the cowboys, who looked like a penguin in a big hat, and knowing his ID was false (“I know how old you are, I sold your father crop insurance this summer”), urged him to go out the back door before the police got there. It must have been Hoiness’s years of barroom rock and roll that sharpened his instincts, because he slipped out the back with the youngster.

When the police arrived, the ear-grip dancing was still in stately progress, and the hair lifting too, though handfuls of it were scattered here and there around the booth. The arrival of the police was like the sound system quitting at a disco. Everything just wound down and stopped. The bartender was fooling with the dial on his radio. One policeman, a handsome young man with curly black hair and a jawline like Superman’s, leaned close to the entrance and kept an eye on things while his companion, a much older man with a bright gold tooth, helped the fellows with their handcuffs. “You can make nice or not,” he said in a jolly way that made everyone feel better, “but it’s down to the hoosegow we go.”

In one way or another, they all agreed to go; they were eager for someone else to plan for them. It was only human. Frank and Karl slipped quickly into the back of one of the two squad cars, embarrassingly surrounded by pedestrians in a town where everyone knew everyone else. Karl said to Frank, “It would have been nice if you hadn’t called that feller over to our table.”

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” said Frank as a joke. But it didn’t go over.

“I thought hindsight was when you had your head up your ass,” said Hammersgard coolly.

“Want me to knock the piss out of you?” Frank inquired, adjusting his suit jacket. He was still trying to look his best.

“No, and besides, you couldn’t. In fact, pull yourself together, Frank.”

The police officer with the gold tooth got in and twisted around like a cab driver to look in back. “Looks like we’re all set,” he said. “Next stop, jail.”

Sheriff Hykema was there to help process the five. The cowboys trooped down to their cell quietly. “Karl, what’s all this about? Don’t you have a game tomorrow?”

“Red Lodge.”

“Go on, get out of here.”

Karl ducked his head slightly and went out the door before the sheriff could change his mind. Then Hykema eased up to Frank. “My lucky day,” he said with a big smile.

“Eat shit,” said Frank, not mincing words.

“Right,” said the sheriff, and turned him over to a deputy with a short crew cut and the kind of clear-rimmed glasses they issue in the armed forces.

Frank went through a very long checking-in period, including fingerprinting and some interviewing against questions on a computer, the answers to which were logged and sent out via modem. “I’m so sleepy,” Frank said to the officer.

“Shut up,” said the officer.

“Right you are. Turn other cheek.”

“It’ll have to be one of your cowboy friends.”

“Oh, those guys. They don’t like me.”

When they put Frank in the cell with his three adversaries, he told them to eat shit just so they would stay away. But they were sick of Frank. He was able to curl up near the drain and pass out with the sense that he was sinking into disarray and hellishness. At the exact moment of sleep, he seemed to plummet.