Nothing but Blue Skies

18

He met Mike at a quarter of twelve at McDonald’s for a quick lunch to discuss something on Mike’s mind. It was already crowded at this old fast food place, with its amusement park shapes and colors now well battered by Montana weather. Even the fiberglass animals and carousel horses looked like they’d come up the trail with the longhorns. Inside, the stainless steel handrail in front of the counter was bowed out toward the condiment and napkin counter by the pressure of tens of thousands of buttocks.

This was Mike’s favorite restaurant. He prided himself on being a prosperous professional who had never developed an interest in the good life: “I live like a dog and I eat like a dog.” This wasn’t quite true, and in Mike’s identification with ordinary people there was a kind of dandyism. They carried their trays to a small table in front of a window where they could see traffic and the pretty farmhouses across the road that had been overtaken by the strip; their deep and shady porches now faced a blazing modern highway. When they sat down, Frank unwrapped his cheeseburger and tipped the cardboard container of french fries on its side.

“My doctor friends say you’re trying to gouge them on the office building.” Mike made this statement with a crazy grin.

“Cheapskates.”

“You got that right. But again, they’re my friends.”

“Why don’t they leave?”

“I don’t know.”

Mike rarely asked Frank to come to McDonald’s. Meeting there for lunch almost always meant something, since even by Mike’s standards the dining was not the issue. When their mother had been in the nursing home, after the fiasco in Fort Myers, she had gone rapidly downhill. Frank tried having her at home and so did Mike, but she no longer knew where she was and would prowl about at all hours. Once she set fire to Mike’s house trying to cook on the gas stove at three A.M. One of Mike’s children found her, nightgown on fire, and Mike had to spray her with a fire extinguisher. “Go ahead, kill me!” she had cried.

Adding to their problems was the fact that she had never liked them as children. She had been a famous local beauty and children had never fit her plans. She had associated Mike and Frank with her decline throughout her life, so that by the time she was old and infirm she openly disliked them. But she got pneumonia from the fire extinguisher and nearly died. So they put her back in the home, which was pleasant but inhabited almost entirely by what looked to Frank like zombies, who sat and stared or held playing cards but didn’t play them or who waited for the meal bells or simply watched television with perfect vacancy or took on small tasks that didn’t need doing, like curtain arrangement or extra dusting.

Frank had loved his mother but got nothing much in return, and even Mike, who hadn’t cared, understood that his mother’s situation was not one to be desired. She reached the point that she no longer got out of bed, then no longer ate and was on life support equipment. This went on for a good while; they visited regularly even though most of the time she didn’t know they were there, and when she did, she was unpleasantly reminded of how little she liked them. Finally, she failed to return to consciousness altogether. After a couple of months, Mike called Frank with his decision. He had spoken to the doctor. An absence could be arranged if Mike and Frank wished to remove her life support system.

“I couldn’t do it,” said Frank.

“You don’t have to do it,” said Mike. “All you have to do is agree it needs to be done and I’ll do it.”

“I just don’t know, Mike.”

“Maybe she’s living in a bad dream, Frank. I’d want mine pulled.”

They agreed that they would do it. Frank wondered, after she died, what the actual moment of death had been: when this decision was reached, or when her pulse stopped and her temperature started down? It was actually Mike who removed the … stuff, the equipment, the tubing. The last thing she said — and they had to go back a number of weeks for this — was something that had just bubbled up from a Johnny Carson show she had seen, and they would never have known that except that Mike had seen the same show. In a crooning, faraway voice, she repeated the words of a famous model who was a guest on the show telling about her photo safari to Tanzania. Their mother seemed to become the model, down to peculiar expressions of enthusiasm like “off the graph”: “The lions were really off the graph!”

They waited a long time after the apparatus was removed and she lingered on. They decided to stay with her in shifts. Mike went home to eat with his family; Frank stayed and watched. She never moved. Frank thought about her for a while, then thought about himself. He considered the compartments they had gotten into over the years, starting with his father the farmer-entrepreneur, his mother the town beauty of the famous Geranium Festival, Frank the investment manager and Mike the orthodontist. Gracie was about to join the former-wife class, and his mother had eased into the class of the soon dead. Frank’s daughter was in the college class, to enter either the professional or the homemaker class and join them all in the grand march off the flat earth. He decided to stop thinking about himself and about all that this meant under his flat-earth view, and to listen. He heard nothing. He got up and stood next to his mother. Her small hand lay open on the bed. Her wrist was terribly thin. He rested his hand next to it and lay his finger across her wrist. Nothing. He remembered how superfluous she thought he was. She said he was the boy who held the lantern while his mother chopped the wood.

“There’s one of my patients,” said Mike. “See that pretty teenager there? Carrying the milk shake? Well, you oughta had a look at her when she arrived on my doorstep. Looked like a church key.”

“She looks fine now.”

“Nothing whatsoever to prevent her from falling into your basic local social pattern. When I got her, she was headed for a life either alone or with a wheat farmer.”

Frank asked himself how two brothers could have turned out so differently. Everywhere Mike looked he saw certainty, definition and meaning. And yet, when they were growing up, Frank was always optimistic and Mike suspicious. Mike’s suspicion had paid off. He knew absolutely where he was going and it didn’t bother him that it was one mouth after another. The inevitable things about life didn’t bother him either. Even death struck him as one more piece of local color, a nostalgic event.

“Frank, what in the hell are you thinking about?”

“I was just thinking how different we are.”

“You just figured that out?”

“No, it still is hard for me to understand.”

“Not me. You’re a year older. You had to break trail. Plus, Dad made more sense to me than he did to you. That’s why everything has seemed so much clearer to me. You always seemed to think Dad was crazy.”

“I suppose.”

“I may be missing a whole layer of life, you know,” Mike said. “Its seriousness. But I don’t strain my mechanism like you do. Sometimes I think you’re like an airplane that keeps taxiing and never quite gets airborne. I’m dumb, I just fly.”

“I was airborne for a while.”

“Maybe you were. But I don’t crave struggle. I enjoy my life. It goes by smooth as silk and I’d just as soon have it that way. I’m a big fat happy guy with a big fat happy wife and several extremely average children. I like it. I’m flying.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Frank. He looked up and saw Dick Hoiness coming in, the old guitarist hidden in a summer suit, and signaled him to come over.

“Hi, Dick,” Frank said coolly as Hoiness reached the table. “I wanted to thank you for slipping out of the bar the other day.”

“It had to be done.”

“Had to be done,” Frank said. “I ought to cancel my insurance.”

“Life will go on.”

“You cancel yours and I’ll cancel mine,” said Mike, always loyal. This might have gotten serious.

“What a day,” said Hoiness, starting for the counter. “Let me know what you want to do, fellas.”

“We forgive you,” said Frank. “We just wish you were more of a stand-up guy.”

“Musicians aren’t like that,” called Hoiness from the counter. “We’re gentle escapists — you know, four-F.”

“What about your claims adjusters?” Mike asked.

“Different breed,” said Hoiness. “Hard-boiled but compassionate, realistic but generous, universally loved. Montana natives one and all. Low rates and prompt attention. Our claims adjusters stand for family values and a decreased dependence on foreign oil.” He turned to the smiling girl behind the counter and ordered. He pointed to each item he ordered on the wall menu behind her, as though she had never heard of these things before.

Frank watched and thought how much he wished things would change faster at McDonald’s. Americans had overtaken their product line, if he was any judge, waiting for McThis and McThat. If there were only a few departures or insights — McShit on the toilets, anything — it would be so much easier to take one’s seat in this American meeting place and not feel such despair that the world was going on without you.

“How’s your deal going?” Mike asked.

“It’s all right. Hasn’t been much to it this last little while. Exchanged some cattle. Everybody’s getting run off the national forest. There’s a bunch of timid traders out there. I had the idea to do a warm-up lot somewhere, maybe Billings, but the way this yearling thing has been looking, the price of feed and everything else, I just didn’t have the juice to do it, not and guarantee gains where they need to be.”

“What about the water slide at Helena.”

“Sold it.”

“The Hertz franchise at Helena — I got to tell you, Frank, I’m hearing all the time now that you’re overextended.”

“It’s true, but I’m getting by with it. The Hertz franchise is fine. I wish I had a bunch more.”

“Frank!” Mike, at first incredulous, was soon off in thought.

Young people had started to fill up the place and were blowing the straw wrappers off their straws. They all looked so intense to Frank, so ready to burst into something. The ones who got crowded shoved back. The ones who were hot, coming in from outside, took off their coats and fanned their faces hard.

“I say we dump the ranch,” said Mike.

“Count me in,” said Frank, still looking at the youngsters clamoring for hamburgers. That should have been a signal to get back into the cattle business more seriously. He had bought and sold thousands of cattle the way other people played pinochle on Thursdays and he had done it with other people’s money as well as his own. Now he was thinking that once he got out from under the present loans, he might not want the risk, responsibility, commitment, whatever. So, sure, sell the ranch. And thus would end an American family’s place on earth.

“You want to list it?” Frank asked.

“Let’s run an ad.”

“Mike, why don’t you write it.”

“Sure, let me write it,” said Mike. “You know, I’m not a reflective guy, but at a time like this it might be nice to sit down and compose a few words about the old place.”

“You want to try it now?”

Mike got a ballpoint out of his shirt pocket, where it had made a dime-sized blue spot. “Fire. You start,” Mike said, and turned over his paper placemat. “Give me a headline.”

“Old home place,” said Frank. “In capitals, OLD HOME PLACE.”

“Okay, then underneath: ‘In same family four generations.’ Didn’t our grandfather start the place?”

“It was his parents. Fattened oxen that came off the immigrant wagons.”

“Gotcha: ‘Local farm dynasty decides to relinquish ancestral headquarters.’ This I like. Don’t say anything against it. ‘Long-awaited decision. Priced to move. Principals only.’ Got it. Hoss, I’m putting it in the Wall Street Journal. I’m going to say that Hollywood types forced us out of the cattle business. That’s one of the best ways to get a Hollywood type to buy it.”

“Add: ‘Moose, deer, bear, elk, grouse, trout.’ ”

“Why?”

“They all have that, all local ads. One keystroke on the IBM. You don’t want this ad to look like it was done in L.A. They never mention the one kind of wildlife they all have, rattlesnakes.”

“All right,” Mike said, writing. “What else?”

“What’s the view?”

“There isn’t one.”

“We better come up with one or we’re going to have to go on owning it. Can we just say, ‘Big sky’?”

“I think that’s fair. That doesn’t really misrepresent anything. I mean, what’s big to one person may not be big to another. Anyway, people who are out there trying to scoop up old family places are in on this bullshit. It’s kind of like date rape. You can’t get fucked if you don’t spread your legs.”

“You’re great, Mike. You always see things so clearly. I get bogged down thinking about the lives that have been lived out there, the crops gathered, the calves shipped.”

“It just gets in the way, Frank.”

Frank left it in Mike’s hands and walked out to the parking lot while his brother visited with the many normal people he knew inside. Whenever they talked business, Mike liked to act tough. That’s why his deals were all stiffs. Frank barely cared, but he did care, and an undetected slyness had worked for him long enough that he was dangerously overextended. He had to keep a mental buoyancy or go under.

The parking lot was now full of cars and the great white clouds were reflected on their colored roofs. Frank looked up and got the feeling he was looking clear into outer space. A truck piled high with yellow split firewood went through the drive-up line with two laughing cowboys in front, their hats on the back of their heads, the radio blaring the Neville Brothers’ “Yellow Moon.”

Frank stopped and tried to feel his detachment against this throbbing daily intensity that was all around for the asking. Whenever he jumped in, he overjumped; when he tried to stay reasonable, he was like a cat burglar in the homes of everyday people, or someone who had broken into the zoo on a day when it was closed. The street was busy; people were pouring in and out of the restaurant. People sat with their car doors open, their feet on the pavement, and ate ice cream. And yet the big vacant sky seemed to proclaim their isolation. Frank found it attractive in a way even he knew was ludicrous, like the impulse that sends shy people to nudist colonies. Or even the one that landed him among the Eskimos. This is why bland people buy sports cars, he thought; things get lively around them and they have to jump in there with their car. He remembered how he and his friends used to dance through the night to the rock bands, none more extreme than Dick Hoiness’s Violet Twilight, or the Great Falls screamers Standing Start, or the psychedelic band from the Assiniboine reservation, Arthur and the Agnostics, with its stupendous lead singer Arthur Red Wolf, or the great all-girl hard-rock band, the Decibelles. And what fun those darn drugs were. Marvelous worlds aslant, a personal speed wobble in the middle of a civilization equally out of control. And it was wonderful, however short, to have such didactic views of everything, everyone coming down from the mountain with the tablets of stone. Hard to say what it all came to now. Skulls in the desert.

Frank set out for the ranch in somewhat higher spirits, the possibility of not owning something that had always been in their lives throwing the place into sudden and blazing relief. He was able to go over its every feature in his mind now, from springs to dragging gates to the smells of the cellar and the loose boards in the parlor, the paint on the cupboard doors with the previous contrasting paint job, the flour bins with the odorless mummified mice. Yes, he thought, a lost home and the gates of hell.

There was little traffic, and clouds distinct enough that one could navigate by them. A distant tractor plowing a summer-fallowed field trailed a plume of brilliant dust high in the air. The yellow-and-black-striped gates at the railroad crossings stood out vividly in the farm greenery along the tracks. “Slippin’ and a-slidin’,” sang Frank to himself, “peepin’ and a-hidin’.” What a day. What freedom, what breezes. What life ahead! “I been told, baby, you been bold!”

When he drove into the farmyard and looked at the fine old white house with its porches and chimneys, its slanted stone-sided cellar entry, its small chaste cedar shingles, the outbuildings, fenced and ditched small fields beyond, he could already feel it floating into abstraction like a diploma, into a rather glamorous distance.

Things seemed to be in apple-pie order, just as they were when Boyd left. That whole thing was entirely unfortunate. He thought with a bit of a thrill that he ought to go over to Boyd’s house and express his regret that things had ever come to such a pass.