Nothing but Blue Skies

28

Frank liked to think he occupied some middle ground between his father and his grandfather. His father had been an Eagle Scout and a good scholar. He had also had a fanatical desire to better himself financially, a personal pride in the score, not unlike the athlete bent on achieving a four-minute mile, a thousand-yard season. Frank’s grandfather was a dour farmer who rarely said much but seemed to take in everything with his great stern eyes. When Frank’s father had first made money to any degree, he took Frank, then nine years old, and his father to the country club for dinner. He made everyone eat a lobster. He drank far too much and stuffed crumpled bills into the waitress’s hand. Frank’s grandfather watched this in silence, then finally boomed out over the lobster shells, “If you can’t drink any better than that, Bill, you had better not drink at all.”

The whole country club heard it. Frank saw his father’s sudden, startling vulnerability, saw both his face and his pride fall at one time and understood the astonishing power of deflation fathers have over their sons. In a way, it made Frank happy not to have a son, on the slim chance he could ever accidentally use this terrible weapon, this atom bomb. He was having the opposite problem with his daughter: he daren’t say a word against the one with the nose ring for fear of receiving a good lecture. Or the head of the citizens’ group, who wished to save Montana for Montanans. He could only learn to feel something was missing from his life, not having a nose ring of his own, a butterfly tattooed on his butt.

On Monday he did not go to work at all. This had almost never happened before. And instead of asking Eileen to hold the fort, he called early in the morning and told her to take the day off too.

She was delighted and said she would go to Helena to watch minor league baseball. “Thank you, Mr. Copenhaver. I’ll be there bright and early tomorrow morning.”

“As you wish, Eileen.”

“Can I ask where you’re going?”

“I’m looking for a mental health professional within comfortable driving distance.”

There was a long pause and then Eileen said in beefy, almost British tones, “I’m going to take a chance here, Mr. Copenhaver, and assume that you are serious. I’m going to tell you that I think that that is a very good idea. I hope you realize that it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I do, Eileen,” Frank said thinly. In fact, he had already made an appointment with a therapist. He was looking at the picture of a movie star in People magazine who was attending a Crow Indian sun dance ceremony, hanging by thongs through his chest from the lodge poles of a prodigious tepee.

A short time later, it seemed to make sense for Frank to stand inconspicuously in the parking lot behind Mullhaven Hardware, watching people park their cars. His eyes were covert slits. An old rancher came in, parked his big Toronado, with its pink and white paint job, and climbed out pocketing his keys. A heavy red-haired woman in jogging pants arrived in a green Wagoneer, thrust the keys under the seat and got out. A man who looked slightly costumed in his gardening clothes drove up in a white Ford station wagon and went inside without making any special movements toward the ashtray, the visor or beneath the seat. When he was out of sight, Frank went to the car and got in.

The keys were in it. There was a crisp, unopened Wall Street Journal on the seat and Frank took a moment to glance at the headlines. The Fed had cut the interest rates again but it was not expected to impact the recession. He started the car and backed out of the angled slot into the alley. He swung around to Main and turned east, enjoying the commodious volume of space behind, thinking of it filled with kids’ bicycles or fitted with a dog barricade or redolent of a well-used rotary mower, green polished off at the corners to a pewter gleam under its veil of 30-weight oil. Unfortunately, it was a brand-new shell of a station wagon and had the familiar, disconcerting, prop-like quality of the unearthly exercise equipment that freighted the yard sales of America.

That feeling went right away as he tooled over the pass, eyeing the various gougings of the nearby mountainsides and looking forward to the prospect of pouring his guts out to a stranger. Then quite suddenly he lost all sense of what he was doing in this car and began checking in the rearview mirror for the police, staring between the retreating twin columns of mountainside reflected down toward his eyes, then scanning the silver-gray bands of pavement and the spheres of white clouds on a dome of blue sky: no cops. The fear passed and he resumed his confident occupancy of the station wagon, custodian of the deeply throbbing wheel and air-light accelerator as the pass opened to the shallow plains of cattle pastures.

It was then that he spotted the cellular phone. It seemed comforting, as if a car thief would scarcely drive the speed limit and make a few telephone calls. First he called Lucy at her office. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said, “and you didn’t come in today.” She didn’t sound hurt, nor did she seem reticent about looking for him.

“I’m trying to make some adjustments, Lu.”

“Who isn’t, Frank? Are you coming in today?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, let me get something off my chest then.”

Frank thought about her chest, the receptive undercurve of her resting bosom. A wonderful homey thing that helped pass the time. “Fire away, Lu.”

“Frank, I don’t think these ‘episodes’ are good for me.”

“No?” He pictured the Buick’s interior, the upended Lucy with a whelk curve of open pink flesh.

“No. Sure, there’s pleasure. But just now they make my, uhm, plight seem more extreme, and it lasts longer than the pleasure. I’ve been noticing that.”

“Aw, Lu.” That sounded unhelpful, but he couldn’t touch the white whale of a subject that buried everyone just now, the deep distaste men and women had for each other of late, the unstable truces of the new marriages, the warlike affairs. Frank hoped they had bypassed that with an avalanche of sheer lewdness, but it was just wishful thinking. Indelicacy was not a cure for everything.

“Anyway,” said Lucy, “I had already come to that conclusion before the other night, and suddenly there I was with my feet on the roof of those people’s car —”

Frank felt a fever go through his face at the very thought and as billboards emerged from pastures, with skiers and swan divers and stylized silhouettes of the Big Sky on them.

“— and I realized that I simply have to ask you, as a friend, to make sure that that never happens again. People like us have a special need to look out for each other, and what we’ve been doing hasn’t been good for me.”

She’s asking me as a friend to quit fucking her!? With all that energy spent on venery, the intricate, often baffling pursuit would turn to poison. Poison! Plus, Frank thought, it’s guilt because of Gracie. We’ve descended from Heartbreak Hotel to Heartbreak Bed-and-Breakfast.

“Okay, Lucy.”

“You make it sound so flat,” said Lucy.

“Well, I don’t want it to. But I guess it makes me feel sort of flat to promise you that.” A candy-apple green Mazda went by at about a hundred. It seemed to have a sidling shudder induced by its pure speed as it mounted the long hill, then disappeared from sight.

“Why?”

“Why? Because I enjoyed it, Lu. I enjoyed you.”

“I enjoyed you too, Frank.”

Right at the interchange where two peninsulas of trailers gathered on the high banks along the highway, a girl was hitchhiking with an aluminum-frame backpack, holding up a sign that said “Madison.” Heading east — that must mean Madison, Wisconsin, not the Madison River. This was Frank’s turnoff but he was going to forget that and give this young woman a ride, this fresh-faced stranger. Frank wheeled over and gestured for her to get in, smiling, indicating that he was on the phone and therefore not able to help much. She put the pack in back and got in. He grinned, tried with shifting and grimacing to indicate he’d be off the phone in a sec.

“But if you want it that way, Lu, we can sure leave it at that.”

“I ask myself if I really want to leave it like that.”

He made out the inner curve of her thighs with sheer peripheral vision. The girl smelled like sagebrush. Brunette, long hair held together low in back with a piece of knotted blue cloth. He started to sweat. He had the tip of one finger on the rim of the abyss, but Lucy’s voice was sucking him back in.

“I guess I can’t answer that one for you, Lucy.”

“Even as I hear myself speaking, I know I’m lying.”

“You do?” How’s that for stupid.

“Yes, I do.”

“How do you mean, exactly?”

“I want you. Frank, I want you.”

“Uh-huh,” said Frank, as if, lifting the hood to add a quart of oil, he spotted smoke coming out from under the valve covers.

“Shall I tell you how?” she asked in a numb, involuntary voice.

“Sure,” he said, absolutely confounded in his effort to bring this to a stop. She began to roll on as in a trance, overcome by the erotic power of her telephone. Frank looked over at the girl, who had raised her eyebrows in a coolish look of inquiry. To underscore his helplessness, he removed the phone from his ear and held it out. Lucy’s voice, reduced to a tiny scratchiness like a little witch doll’s, projected into the car’s interior: “… when you’re all the way in my mouth and I feel your big balls …”

“Stop the car,” shouted the brunette. She had thrust her legs out and seized the door handle as if to suggest that she would jump if he didn’t stop.

“Frank!” shouted Lucy through the phone. “Are you with someone this very minute?”

“Call you back, gotta go.” He hung up and pulled off to the side of the road, where the girl jumped out, turned and flung open the back door, hauling out her backpack.

“I’m really very sorry,” said Frank.

But she was walking already, eating up the miles with her long legs, her house on her back, free of filth. His shirt was stuck to his skin. He was furious with himself for not going to the office. Plus, why steal cars? He started backing up along the side of the road, to reach the interchange where he was supposed to have turned. He had backed up nearly a half mile when a police car came over the crown of the hill, then pulled off the road in front of him. In a moment the cop was at Frank’s window, a world-weary veteran with small features and a collection of loose wattles falling from beneath his chin.

“Miss your turn?”

“Yes,” Frank breathed, “I’m afraid I did.”

“You know you aren’t supposed to back up along the interstate like that.”

“I’m sorry,” said Frank, with such feeling the officer gave him a long look. “I know I’m guilty and I’m sorry.”

“Let me see your driver’s license.”

Frank leaned forward to free his wallet and the cop backed around the car with his clipboard to get the number on the license plate. He looked up just as he started writing, and said with considerable annoyance, “There’s one of them college hitchhikers again. That’s been illegal for ten years.” Batting the clipboard against his hip, he strided toward Frank’s window. “I’m going to let you back up and turn off. But you aren’t supposed to and I am not supposed to let you. So don’t do it again.”

Frank left and let the cop drive up and bust Miss Clean.

At Gracie’s request, he had once seen a therapist, a meeting that went very badly from the beginning. There was all sorts of persiflage about his holding or not holding the door as they entered her office, and Frank could feel a kind of electricity coming from between her shoulder blades as she moved around her desk to sit down facing him.

There was a large photograph of a crowd scene over her desk which said underneath it, “How many forms of abuse can you find?” As he looked at her, he thought of the word “pig.” Not, strangely enough, that he thought she was a pig, but he could sense that she had already decided he was one. He knew that that was the totem animal not only of ugly women but of overeaters and men of exaggerated masculinity. He had tried to work up a wussy shuffle for his arrival, but then they had the little showdown about what he was “trying to say” in holding the door for her. Everything about being here was awkward. In a conciliatory way, he told her he couldn’t help acting like a pig because he was the owner of some of the best show pigs in the state. She didn’t react. The gender thing was dialed up to where he couldn’t even figure out how to sit down. They ended up seated across the desk from each other. The window was behind her and he had to squint as he answered her questions.

“Do you drink?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever been drunk?”

“Yes.”

“More than once?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Has it occurred to you that you may be an alcoholic?”

“No.”

“Has it occurred to you that you are in denial?”

“What’s denial?”

“Denying that you are an alcoholic?”

“No. Sometimes I forget to drink for half a year at a time.”

“Are you familiar with the term ‘dry drunk’?”

“Well, just sort of.”

“Often, if we don’t drink and at the same time fail to seek counseling, we become what are called dry drunks.”

“I’m not following. Are you a dry drunk?”

The therapist’s face flared red. “Hardly! Is it the position you are trying to take with me that any little help I may try to be of to you is simply mud you are going to sling back into my face?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am a mental health therapist and must accept, in the line of duty, a certain amount of punishment. But just so you know, if you were outside the walls of this office, what you just tried to dish out to me is a little verbal abuse. It is virtually diagnostic of denial.”

Frank nodded gamely but he really didn’t get it. “How much this thing gonna come to?”

This gave Mirabelle time for thought. That was her name and she asked to be called Dr. Mirabelle, an odd mixture of formal and informal. In his confusion, he still viewed her as a dry drunk, though he wasn’t sure what it was.

“You’re changing the script, Frank. We’re talking sideways anger, here. Attempts to control me through undermining questions about my financial arrangements with you or any other patient will go, you’ll find, nowhere.”

“You don’t have to stare me down. It was an innocent question.”

“Sixty dollars! I’m not ashamed of being recompensed for my hard work. You can take your control questions elsewhere. That issue fails to appear on my agenda.”

“Everything I say seems to upset you so much,” he said nervously, fishing his checkbook from his shirt pocket.

“It’s not ‘about’ being upset,” she shouted. “I’m not buying into that!”

He wrote frantically. It was like spending sixty dollars to get out of jail. He slid the check across the desk. She made as if she didn’t even see it. Her lips were so pursed, it looked like someone had just stolen her cigar.

“In all honesty,” Frank said, “this sort of thing doesn’t really seem right for me. Crazy as it may seem to you, I feel sort of abused myself, kinda gypped.”

“Welcome to the human race,” she said. “It’s about welcome. It’s about accepting your ordinariness. It’s about finding meaning in the everyday.” Frank sensed she was trying to jam in some advice to make this sixty-dollar bum deal seem more palatable. “It’s about letting go, Frank, and sensing a sharing that takes place for those who know what it is to be human.” Frank left her seated at her desk, knowing that when he was out of sight she would pick up his check and that, painful as it might be, it was somehow “about” cashing the check.

And at the same time, he felt poorly. Most everyone he knew was in a program for recovery. He had felt quite isolated by not joining something, had never really felt anything applied to him, but he got the very strong message that he had not tried hard enough. Gracie really wanted him in a program and he would have been willing to meet her halfway, but somehow they got lost in all the choices, all the initials. Now, in his first skirmish and probably his last, he had failed. It was better to have never tried at all than to have failed a program so abruptly. It was as bad as feeling all right, when it seemed to be plain to everyone that this was a sign of his detachment from his true inner feelings. It was like flunking life. The dialogue dropped away and even his considerate and hopeful fibs about “the child within” sagged pitifully. He felt like some bogus stoop who didn’t actually have a child within. Certainly, Edward Ballantine had one, even as big and hairy as he was. That might have accelerated Gracie’s departure.

Instead of going to his appointment with the therapist, a new one named Bob, Frank drove back toward town, went into the Long Haul Saloon and had a glass of draft beer. He used the pay phone to call the receptionist and cancel his appointment. He told her that he had “this thing that’s been going around.” When he went back outside, squinting into the sunshine, he found the police preparing to tow the station wagon and was impressed by their efficiency in locating the vehicle. He walked over to Powell Street, bought the paper and caught a westbound bus with but three people aboard. Two were girls who seemed to be sisters in their early teens, with similar bangs and anachronistic pageboy haircuts that looked homemade — country girls who averted their eyes, looked at each other and smothered grins by burying their chins on their chests. The other passenger was a trucker with a four-day beard, leather vest and chrome chain leading to his back pocket.

Riding back toward home, with no obligation for guiding the vehicle, sitting with strangers, he savored the anonymity and wondered if the mild euphoria was based on simple movement or avoided responsibility. On the other hand, what was his responsibility? He was eating, he was clothed, he was out of the rain. He was making his way to the edge of the flat earth. He wasn’t as driven as the people who, to protect their own product, circulated the rumor that Corona beer contained dog urine, nor the New York soft-drink interests who claimed Tropical Fantasy soda pop was manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contained ingredients for sterilizing black males. Air Sununu was grounded. And the art market was in a recession. “Unlike stocks and bonds, many works of art are unique,” said the Wall Street Journal. And in the wake of a Royal Dutch/Shell Group refinery fire, the price of crude was up while pork bellies settled sharply. Constant busyness out there, no time to think, but the four of us on this bus are lost in our thoughts, our fortunes turned over to the man in gray up front there at the wheel who drives us but never indicates his intentions. Frank allowed his gaze to settle on the driver, feeling despair at the smooth movement of his hands on the wheel.