Nothing but Blue Skies

21

Frank put his car in the short-term parking lot and walked into the airport, a low and rustic-looking modern terminal just past which could be seen the tall silver tail of an airplane. It was dusk and the airplane was tinted with the dusty pink of sunset. Frank was sure it wasn’t Holly’s plane, and when he got inside he found he had almost ten minutes to spare.

He stopped at the newsstand and bought the paper, skimmed the local news and left it on a plastic chair. The plane on the ground was being loaded and there was a short line at the security x-ray. A few of the older and more countrified travelers who perhaps had not flown much put their purses and other belongings on the conveyor belt with extreme suspicion. Frank hunted around for a tearful goodbye and found one, a plain girl in dowdy navy blue slacks and jumper, squeezing the hand of a vague-looking youth with long sideburns and a catfish mustache; she wept silently. She stared into his face almost imploringly while he gazed around in a rubbernecked way, as if to say, “Get a load of this.”

Frank was eager to see which one was leaving. When the ticket agent announced the final boarding call, the girl released the young man’s hand and boarded the plane. The young man looked around anxiously to see if anyone had been watching, and in case someone had, he wiped his brow with the back of his hand and flicked the imaginary drops of perspiration to the ground. In a matter of time, Frank thought, this loving relationship would be converted into a marriage.

Frank joined the mixed group at the big window in scanning the sky for the next inbound flight. For some reason, he remembered a winter trip to St. George, Utah, he had taken with Gracie and Holly. He and Gracie had had an argument at their motel and Holly pretended to be drowning in the swimming pool. It was a realistic imitation of a drowning person — face down, limbs slowly sinking — and it ended the argument. Frank and Gracie were startled that Holly would go to such lengths. The desert abruptly seemed pointless.

A glint appeared to the north, right at the level of the horizon, and began to enlarge. A moment later, the plane was taxiing at right angles to the terminal, a good way off, and then it turned and came straight in — pure, pretty silver, pink in the dusk with wriggling heat waves behind it and a big sound that suddenly penetrated the building.

Frank stared at every passenger emerging from the expanding tunnel that attached itself to the plane. Some passengers took their own sweet time getting off and held up people behind them. After the first press, only a few passengers remained and Frank was afraid Holly wasn’t among them. But then she emerged, burdened by carry-on luggage, magazines and rolled-up newspapers, with the beaming smile that still filled Frank with complete happiness. She affected a rolling, impatient sailor’s gait until the last passengers were out of her way.

He put his arms all the way around Holly and her luggage and squeezed. It was wonderful to feel plain love, even stupid love, just this sense of everything mattering all at once. He began hanging the luggage from one arm as he unloaded it from Holly’s. “Do you have a suitcase?”

“Nope, this is it.”

They walked toward the lobby. Frank gazed at her from the side while she walked, looking straight ahead, occasionally smiling at him. Holly had a serenely pretty olive face with brown, almost black, eyes that were as intense as the eyes of a sleek, quick animal. But when she grinned every bit of her face was affected in a crinkled way that swept Frank away with appreciation. She was wearing baggy cotton pants and a washed-out pink mountaineer’s jersey. She had an old green bookbag with a drawstring of the kind that prevailed during Frank’s college years. And she wore a big, cheap man’s wristwatch without a strap safety-pinned to the jersey. She looked a little like her mother, but even more definitely she had inherited Gracie’s careless prettiness and the unpretentious assumption that, somehow, she was being admired. Our only child, thought Frank. It’s true!

They got in the car and started toward town. Along the road out to Seventh, clouds of grackles showered down from power lines and swept back up again. Holly picked up one of Frank’s cassettes and smiled. “Can I play this?”

Neil Young filled the car, guitar feedback and all. Holly played it loud and looked out the window at the weedy ditches flying by, the crazy, day-in-and-day-out blue sky of Montana, and the mournful howl of Neil Young: “Your Cadillac got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” It was funny, Frank thought, how that tone of apocalypse just kind of went away.

When the song was finished, Holly turned it off and looked fondly at Frank. She said, “Dad.”

“Weird Dad,” Frank said.

“Weird Dad.” She punched out the cassette and held it up. As she peered at it, it seemed to acquire the quality of an artifact. “Where do you find these things?”

“They find them when they demolish old mansions.”

“Like you used to do?”

“Yeah. They tore down this copper baron’s mansion in Butte. The walls were filled with Bob Dylan. When they got to the attic there was a mountain of Big Brother and the Holding Company posters and Jefferson Airplane albums nearly devoured by pack rats.” Frank was getting into this. He saw the black hand of times gone by lying on this treasure trove.

For some reason, Holly liked to toy with the idea of her parents’ great and irreversible ancientness. She loved anecdotes about the sixties, which she associated with her father; she viewed him as a romantic rebel of ambiguity. She knew that he not only wasn’t fighting or protesting, he was demolishing the mansions and heirlooms of unguarded America. He was furnishing franchises with salad bars — and he never ate salad. He hated salad. He liked T-bones and potatoes. He even tried to tear down Mama’s indigo plantation! This last was a shared family-origin tale, though Mama owned no such plantation. Daddy the opportunist appears on the levee with a wrecking bar in his hand and a Los Angeles restaurant-chain contract in his hip pocket like a four-shot derringer. Gracie allowed a barbaric rakishness to seep into her version of Frank’s fomenting the spread of neon down the Mississippi. Holly always wanted to hear little stories of how they met and married.

“What would you like to eat?”

“Are you cooking for me?”

“Have I ever not?”

Holly puzzled through the tense, then said, “No, you’ve never not.”

Frank had already started her favorite, a monster of calories and simplicity known as New England boiled dinner, featuring corned beef, rutabaga, new potatoes, hot mustard and coarse grain bread he got from the Blue Moon bakery, whose sweet-smelling baked goods were proscribed by every responsible doctor. And beer. He loved to guzzle yellow cans of Coors with his beautiful daughter and talk football, school work, America, money, romance, the evolving life of the Great American West.

She always asked about his fishing. Sometimes he showed her a new rod or an English reel or curious flies like sparkle duns and olive emergers and flashabou woolly buggers. They’d pull open his desk drawer at home and peer into the pewter-colored fly boxes with their exotic mysteries of silk and steel and feathers. He’d mention favorite river names: the Sixteen, the Ruby, the Madison, the Jefferson, the Bow, the Crow’s Nest, the Skykomish, the Dean. When she was a little girl, he would make up stories that took place in the great drainages like the Columbia or the Skeena or the Missouri, and the place names would restore their years together. He could still thrill her with the story about the time the great brown trout towed his canoe past the city of Helena in the middle of the night, past the glow of its lights on the night sky of August, a fish he had to break off at the head of thundering rapids whose standing waves curved five feet high in the cold white moonlight.

They listened to the local news and weather as Frank finished cooking and Holly set the table. She laid out the utensils and napkins; she centered the hot pad and then Frank served the meal and poured the beer. They sat down and Holly sighed.

“This is it,” said Frank.

“No food on the plane. I’m ready.”

Frank gazed with pride at his own cooking. Most of the time, he ate Lean Cuisine microwave dinners, Campbell’s tomato soup or leftovers dumped into half-limp taco shells while fixated on the livestock reports, the index of leading indicators, new home starts, west Texas intermediate crude or some other fool thing that seemed to connect him with the economics games there were to be played. In some ways, he loved money; he certainly loved the sedative effects of pursuing it, and if that was all money did for him at this point, it had much to be said for it. The year he tried to escape into bird-watching, into all the intricacies of spring warblers and the company of gentle people, he had been forced to conclude that nothing got him out of bed with quite the smooth surge of power — as the Chrysler ads used to say — like the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Also, he was good at it and always had been. His mother had said he had his father’s nose: he could pick up the scent of a deal from a good ways off, as sharks are said to do with blood. He actually had the knack to a greater degree than his father.

“I regard this as a quality family atmosphere,” Frank said to Holly.

The superb golden light of evening came down through the leaves of the Norwegian silver maple and through the windows of the dining room and lit up their faces and the things on the table.

“Who’s your current boyfriend?”

“A fellow named Mark Plante.”

“I don’t like the sound of this. What’s he like?”

“Kind of a comical little nitwit. He won’t be around long.”

“I like this guy more and more.”

“There’s plenty where he came from. They’re like fleas on a dog. I’ve had several lunches with the leader of a citizens’ group. I’ve also had a few attentions from a young history professor.”

“They’ve begun preying on the students, have they?”

“I thought they always have.”

“Well, with these bountiful federal grants, there’s more time for dalliance than there was in my day.”

“They had other problems in your time — keeping you people from breaking into the president’s office and smoking the cigars, burning the flag, describing the pink spiders crawling out of your desks to the biology professor who can’t seem to make them out.”

“Don’t ridicule, Holly. That stuff’s coming back. What about this bird from the citizens’ group? Haven’t I heard of him?”

“He gets in the papers from time to time. He wants to keep Montana for Montanans.” Holly smiled with a new potato rakishly poised on a fork. “Would you ever let your hair grow again?”

“No. I don’t think any of us would. It’s better to hide these secrets. To infiltrate. To duly note the action of the scavengers who have followed us down the great American highway.”

“The secret drifter.”

“The secret drifter.”

“You are a drifter, aren’t you, Daddy? In your heart?”

“A drifter.”

“But you don’t move much anymore.”

“This is my home. Recently, though, I visited the Eskimos.”

“And?”

“About what you would expect, sans igloos. They’re in a place that’s hard to live and it seems to get them down. They have TV. They know what’s going on. They want to know why they got dealt the permafrost. There are anthropologists and sociologists up there teaching them to curse their fate and cast their blame in a wide circle.”

“I don’t understand what you were doing there.”

“I wanted to get away. Remember Mama’s friend Lucy? She’s a travel agent. I told her to just put a little trip together for me that would really be a break. I told her I’d go anywhere she sent me.”

“How is Lucy, anyway?”

“She’s bored, a fine person. She sits under the posters of tropic isles and doesn’t really care if anyone goes anywhere or not. You hear it in her voice. She doesn’t have that big belief, that Kathie Lee Gifford sort of booming view of people getting out and about on a cruise ship. She doesn’t really see why anyone bothers. And of course this pops up on the balance sheet as self-fulfilling prophecy —” He stopped abruptly. He could hear himself talking exactly as he would if he were talking to Gracie. When he looked at Holly, who was not eating but simply gazing both fondly and reflectively at him, he knew she was having the same thought, or something very much like the same thought.

“Do you know why I stopped talking?” he inquired.

“Yup.”

“I thought so. Well, what can you do.”

Holly said, “I’ll wash, you dry.”

He turned on the radio, the oldies station, and Van Morrison sang while they worked.

You can take all the tea in China,

Put it in a big brown bag for me,

Sail right round all the seven oceans,

Drop it straight into the deep blue sea.

“As we boogie to the suds,” said Holly, arms deep in the soapy water, Frank with his towel and lost in his dreams. “I know you’re thinking about Mama,” she said.

That night Frank lay in bed and watched the full moon from his window, the great pure shape rising through the telephone lines, the treetops and over the roofs to race cool and smooth and alone in the sky. Its pale light barely illuminated the distant mountains. He couldn’t sleep. He almost felt he’d gotten a hold of the moon and was being towed along in the chill.

He wondered what was to become of Holly. She was certainly the most reliable person he knew, filled with plans she was capable of achieving. He did not think she was liable to be swept away by someone she had failed to size up correctly. He liked life’s randomness, its buckshot absurdity and disconnections, but he didn’t like them for his daughter. The story possibilities for his life were getting narrower by the minute and randomness was perhaps what his life needed. Holly, he thought, needed narrowing story possibilities. Lying in his own panel of cold moonlight, Frank thought only of the madmen, the crazy drivers, the pretty boys, the flamboyant professors, the head of the citizens’ group, the careerists. He was worried sick about Holly and that was that.