Nothing but Blue Skies

23

He was dreaming:

“I would like to have sex with you,” Gracie said.

“That would be nice.”

“It’s more or less free, you know.”

“More or less?”

“Free. Plus options, taxes and dealer prep. Hope that eases the sticker shock.”

“It does.”

Where exactly were they? Frank woke up and stared toward the ceiling, not quite making it out in the faint light from the street. They were in Texas, that was it. Victoria? Corpus Christi? He couldn’t quite remember. It was outside of town in an old motel, so the sign said “Motor Court,” with mesquite and cat’s-claw growing right up to its dirt parking area. There was a little store across the road that said “Smith Gro.” The town was just beyond. Someone had painted on a viaduct, “El North Side.”

Frank leaned over on his stomach and adjusted the clock’s face toward himself. It was after three. It was awful lately, seeing all these crazy hours, which had remained undisclosed for years in a zone of sleep safety. There was a gasp of air brakes and Frank held himself, face sweating into the pillow, until his cock jolted in his fist. He thought lightly, This is no way to live. The phone rang and was quickly picked up in the bedroom across the hall. Holly talking to a boyfriend in the dark. Three in the morning. Hot wires to Missoula.

Frank left before Holly awakened. He wrote her a note as he ate his breakfast, listening for movement in her room. She might have been on the phone for a long time. He walked to the office, taking in the songbirds’ cascade of music from the garden beds along his way. Birds are very important, he told himself, trying to peg in one value to start the day. An old man pulled handfuls of wet green grass clippings from beneath his lawn mower. Across the street, the yellow cherry-picker arm of a phone company truck rose slowly through the branches of a maple tree.

Eileen acknowledged him with the least movement of her chin she could manage. He had left her sequestered by paper mountains, offering no leadership whatsoever for weeks now. She could take anything — murder, mayhem — but not lack of management, and he could see her sullenness growing by the second. It was just like Boyd Jarrell. Frank was now what the Mexicans called a perro enfermo, a sick dog, something in his center not quite as it was supposed to be.

He was perfectly well aware of how he was letting things slip. Nevertheless, he went straight past to his own quarters, sat down and tried to reignite the importance of title reports, brand receipts, sharecropping contracts, rent receipts, tax assessments and reassessments, the basic paper trail of doom as he currently saw it; hostile letters from the Forestry Department, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife; partnership offers and get-rich-quick schemes as they were understood by a limited business environment such as his. He longed to prowl once more in the subdivisions where the tough insurance men and car dealers and rising doctors lived. He longed for the sight of a booze-disheveled bank vice president vaguely picking his nose over a Book-of-the-Month Club notice in his veneered den. He loved those rare moments of capturing people without their game faces on. By the time he got to work in the morning, the world was already in a three-point stance, resting its weight on its knuckles. He wanted to reacquire that stance, learn what he had once known but what had seemed to slip away with his wife.

He had spent his life with his guard down and wanted to return the favor. He remembered when they first moved to town and the Episcopalians came out during the evenings before Christmas to carol. Frank and his family felt blurred and unfocused behind their window while the Episcopalians, with long scarves and song books, with real singing voices, tenors, basses, sopranos, baritones, round singing lips and red cheeks like people on Christmas cards, sang to the goofy Catholics in their house. “Look at them,” said his father, watching the snow sift down on their quality faces. “If I don’t bankrupt a few before it’s over, I won’t have lived.”

The first spell in town had been a strain. His parents fought continually in their small house, culminating in his father’s stringing a taut strand of barbed wire down the middle of the marital bed to make sure there would be no mingling. His mother complained that she couldn’t get the bedding on the mattress without great difficulty and that she didn’t want to be on his side anyway. “This way we’re sure,” said the old man, still trying to learn how to run his apartment building and live in town. He had a bunch of Indians in there too, loud reservation Cheyennes who were always cooking in the middle of the night and playing the radio.

Frank picked up his phone and asked Eileen to come in. He had made a list of minute things she could not possibly have remembered and put them in his top drawer, which was open just enough for him to read them, an old trick of his father’s. Eileen entered seeming to wonder what on earth he could want with her. Her discontent was taking new forms every day.

“Everything all right, Eileen?”

“Just fine,” she sang.

“That’s good. I’m afraid I have been a little absentminded lately, which can’t have been pleasant for you.” Silence. “But I’m sure you got along without me just fine.” Silence. Eileen smiled slightly and Frank’s eyes dropped to his list in the drawer. “Eileen. Couple of things. The Willow Creek place. I asked you to get the water rights adjudication info from the county. May I have it now?”

“When was this?”

“I asked you to get it two months ago.”

Eileen barely moved. “I’ll have to get it now.”

“I see, Eileen. Okay. And the double billing from the surveyors. Is that in hand?”

“I’ll have to check.”

“Where is the video cattle auction literature I asked for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

Frank slipped the drawer shut and tilted his chair back. He let the last trace of sound leave the room. Eileen was back on the job now and not wallowing in the managerial vacuum Frank had created. But he didn’t want to release her. There was something else. He didn’t know what it was yet, but he could feel it rising toward the surface with a slight dread. Then it was here.

“Tell me, Eileen, does my wife ever call you?”

Eileen looked down.

“I see. And what does she want?”

A helpless shrug.

“Does she want money?”

“—”

“She wants money, then.”

“No.”

“She doesn’t want money. Then what does she want?”

“I don’t know.”

“She wants information. Where is she, Eileen? And this time I want an answer.”

Eileen said, “You find out yourself, playboy.”

This was too astonishing. He had to imagine he had misheard. He tried to think of other words that sounded like “playboy.” Frank wandered to the window, his temples pounding. He had pushed Eileen too far. Instinctively he looked for the old couple, remembered the old man unwrapping his wife’s piece of candy. The sun slanted like an examining light into the corners of the yard. A bright and slumbrous column of dust marked a recently departed automobile. A magpie sat on the single telephone wire that soared in and attached to the wall. He realized that Eileen had pretty much said what he thought she had said. He would come in from another direction.

“Quite right, Eileen,” said Frank. “I haven’t been what I should have been of late. We’ll see what we can do.”

Eileen listened and Frank imagined that she was comparing him perniciously to his own father. It left him with the feeling that in speaking to Eileen, he was never quite speaking for himself, with her mustiness of another era.