Nothing but Blue Skies

31

He drove five hard hours to Whitefish, where he took a room on the lake. For most of the next day he watched the cat’s-paws move across the blue water and listened to a train travel through the woods above the dark, stony beach. He lay out on the dock and watched the cutthroats fin around the pilings. There were numerous smoke-blackened fireworks fragments and Frank, lying face down with his nose between the boards, smelled gunpowder. He loved that smell. He occasionally thought it would be pleasing to shoot several people in particular, accompanied as that would be by this fine smell. A plane went by overhead; no reason he couldn’t be in that plane. A boat glided past and there was no reason he couldn’t be on that boat.

Just at sundown he paddled a floating cushion out to the middle of the lake, legs dangling in the cool green water, where he met a radiologist, a woman in her forties, also on a cushion, hers with parti-colored seahorses and an inflated pillow. She worked in Kalispell and came here, she said, anytime she found a cancer, to float between earth and sky and to sustain, on her seahorse floatie, a sense of deep time that could accommodate life and death. Frank looked at her long, melancholy face with its thick, seemingly puffy lips, stringy hair and short square brow and said, “You have a hard job.”

She took a moment to consider. “Yes I do. My job is to search for something I hope I don’t find. That is a hard job, mister.”

Darkness seemed to be forming, a circle of contracting shadows from the shoreline and faint stars overhead. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and when Frank reached out to take the tip of the radiologist’s finger, he was able to draw her raft to him with an ounce of pressure. Her face was now an inch away and they both moved imperceptibly toward each other to kiss. Her mouth was open and he tasted a mentholated cough drop. He slipped his hand a small distance inside the top of her bathing suit and felt a hard nipple. He opened his eyes and thought he could make out trembling water around her raft. The bottom of her bathing suit was drawn across the points of her hips and a flat stomach.

Very quietly, Frank moved to board the radiologist’s raft, a delicate matter that worked, right up to the point that it didn’t work; and with a sudden rotary motion the radiologist shot out of sight. “Hey!” Frank shouted impulsively, and trod water between the plunging shapes of the floaties. He felt the radiologist’s head under the arch of his foot and struggled to get a hold of her. She came up spraying water from her mouth and with a minimum of floundering she got onto her raft again, on her stomach, and began to paddle toward shore. Frank followed her.

“What’s your problem?” she said when he overtook her.

“Same problem as everybody else.”

“Oh, this’ll be good,” she said. “What is it?”

“I’m just trying to get some meaning in my life.” Frank felt he was leaping from line to line.

“Ha, ha.”

They walked together along the railroad track in the last light. There was enough curve in the lakeside route that the rails were always disappearing on the geometry of creosote sleepers just ahead in the woods. Honeysuckle grew wild down the steep banks where lake water glimmered through the trunks of tall old pines. Elise, that was her name, chatted along amiably and was very good at naming the birds they saw — the chipping sparrows, the yellowthroats, the kinglets. There was something about the way she touched her fingertip to the droplets of resin on the pine bark that made Frank think, I may be headed for a world of poontang.

In Frank’s room, she peered examiningly at his cock. “The baleful instrument of procreation. Ooh,” she said, squeezing hard, “I can tell I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you having a nice time?” she asked.

“Like my grandpa used to say, ‘If this ain’t it, you can mail mine.’ ”

They kissed and she slipped a cough drop from her mouth into his; it was like a cool breeze. He slid down the length of her and, spanning the backs of her knees with his hands, licked deep into her. She moaned, then jumped out of bed and ran around the furniture. “That cough drop has set me on fire!” she hollered, and went into the bathroom. He heard her running the water and tried to decide what to do with the cough drop. Finally, he spit it down the wall behind the bed. He tried to blot his tongue on the wallpaper. She came back in with a washcloth clamped to her crotch, got into bed and sent the cloth back toward the bathroom with a kind of hook shot.

“Just quit pussyfooting around,” she said, “and stick it in.”

She had a long, firm body that she must have worked hard to keep in such shape, and she flung it around with great confidence in its appearance. Frank hadn’t made such buoyant love in memory. He got happier and happier until he wondered briefly if her energy was connected by some means to having found a cancer that day. He felt exultant and did not consider asking about it.

Then, when they were through, he did think about that. Lying there, he must have been looking off and she caught it, scrutinizing him. The room was silent. She leaned across him, picked up the phone and dialed. After a moment, she spoke. She just said, “Hi.” Then the other person spoke. Then she said, “Sorry, I couldn’t make it,” and hung up. It was out of the question to ask who was on the other end; something in the flat way she spoke made Frank know that she was supposed to have been fucking this other person and not over here at the lake fucking him.

It was late and the only thing they could get was the weather channel. Elise was smart and it was fun to talk to her about the possibilities of weather. There was a stalled-out high where they were and they could see it on the national weather map. Elise knew where it was going to go when it began to move; it was headed for the Dakotas. She stood naked beside the television set and pointed to where it was going. Their drought was over but it looked like others’ had just begun. She came back to bed. Frank could see where the heat spread west from Bullhead City, Arizona, then hit a kind of Pacific wall and stalled, rising slowly up the coast of California … She had her mouth on him now and the antics of the weatherman with his pointer didn’t make any sense at all.

When they’d finished, Frank turned the weather off and got back into bed. They talked awhile about property. Frank said housing starts were way up in his part of the state. “The contractors who hung in during the eighties are really booked. Everybody’s working. We’re all trying to woo these new businesses, but our unemployment rates are so low and our warehouses so full, we know we’re askew on their shopping lists. I’ve got a little building I rent as a clinic-slash-boutique to four doctors.”

“Oh, that’s great.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m just there at the Valley Hospital. It’s okay. I don’t pack anything home with me. I’m still in my hippie mode, down deep.”

“Were you a hippie?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Huh, so was I.”

“I mean, I was pretty motivated compared to some of them, but I consider myself an old hippie. What do you think I’m doing here?”

“People were doing this before the hippies.”

“Not with the same spirit,” said Elise. “I was hitchhiking around Europe, and in Italy they called us I amici di Liverpool, because they thought all the hippies came from Liverpool, kind of a hangover from the Beatles era.”

“I guess Italians get the news a little late.”

“They just get it when they want it …” She seemed to drift off and then spoke again. “What’s the policy on your toothbrush?”

“You can use it.”

“Mm.” He could feel her drift off, her back to him. He put his arms around her and thought about considering the weather with someone else … thundershowers in Indiana … lake effect … Then he thought, To be living.

He woke up in the dark. He was alone. That was probably why he woke up. The bathroom light was on. He made out a knee beyond the lighted doorway with the corner of a newspaper over it. He heard a deep, solid fart. He remembered a map-reading scene in a movie about the Civil War, when the noise of cannon fire was muted so you could hear the dialogue of strategy.

She sensed something. “Are you awake?”

“Just.”

“Is this your Journal?”

“Yup.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It says, ‘Natural gas is the fuel of the future.’ ”

“I see.”

“It’s a joke,” Elise said. “I know you were awake when I made that little noise.”

“I’m afraid I was.”

“ ‘The 1990s were supposed to bring a golden era for the gas industry. Repeated threats of oil shortages, ever-toughening pollution laws and federal tax credits refunding up to seventy percent of exploration costs seemed to guarantee that gas would become the dominant fossil fuel.’ What do you think?”

“I don’t have a strong feeling about this one way or the other.”

“Yet you lay there like a secretive little mouse because I cut one lousy fart in the privacy of a motel bathroom.”

“I wasn’t being secretive. I was asleep.”

Elise came back to bed in a flood of warmth and immediately cuddled. “You married?”

“Separated.”

“Since when, since breakfast?”

“Long time. How about you?”

“Yup, nice husband, two nice kids, boys.”

“So, what’s this all about?”

“I belong to a dick-of-the-month club.”

“Seriously.”

“How should I know? You paddle out to the middle of a northern Montana lake to be alone and a decent-looking guy paddles out and rolls your raft. There’s nobody else out there. It’s determinism, it’s fate. Fate says: Put out, Elise. So, Elise puts out. You seemed to welcome the fate of Elise and its atmosphere of festivity. You seemed to salute the cheating heart of Elise.”

“This is an unusual thing for you?”

“Not particularly.”

“Was that your husband on the phone?”

“Nope.”

“What about the cancer?”

“That was pretty much true. I confess that it’s also sort of an unimpeachable excuse. But don’t you think that most personal freedom is built on other people’s misfortune?”

“Good grief.”

“I never look at a set of x-rays without being reminded how short life is. Lust follows. It’s like living in a city under siege. And here’s another weird thought: I’d hate to ever have to x-ray someone I’ve had sex with.”

A few minutes later, Frank let his eyes close. What an adorable woman, he thought, a little crush forming; so full of life and now asleep with an untroubled conscience. Her peace was catching and he was soon falling asleep with a feeling that was a lot like love.

In the morning, they got doughnuts and coffee from a gas station-convenience store. The sky was clear except for a huge white thunderhead to the west that caught a pink-orange effulgence from the morning sun. Elise slid into her yellow Jeep Cherokee. Traffic headed toward Flathead streamed past behind her. She nodded, smiled as if to say “yes” or “yep” or “uh-huh” and pulled into traffic. He knew she loved him too.

He finished his coffee and went back to the motel to check out. He felt a goofy pride to see the thrashed and discomposed bed. “Good job, Frank,” he said aloud, and climbed into the shower, letting the needles of hot water drive into his revitalized flesh. Then he shaved. Frank loved to shave. It was a daily challenge to get the little groove in his upper lip and to make the sideburns come out even. He had to stretch the skin of his neck to shave it smoothly, as it no longer stayed taut on its own. What difference does it make if my flesh is firm, he thought smugly, if they’re going to put out like that anyway? That simple fiesta of venery has restored me. I’m like the happy duck that spots the decoys.