Nothing but Blue Skies

32

He checked out and drove south toward Missoula, where he fancied the prospect of running into Gracie while he was detumescent, indifferent, superficially inquiring, amiable. The only thing new he had to talk about was whether or not he had lost his touch, and he didn’t expect to admit or say that.

There was a fair amount of traffic on 93. Summertime seemed to reveal the ranches along that route in all their nakedness: junk-filled yards, small corrals with a couple of steers or sheep in them, modest flower boxes, yards that seemed meant only for their occupants and not the careering tourists of 93. Huckleberry stands appeared between Whitefish and Kalispell, then, as he started down the fjord-like shores of Flathead Lake, stands selling the incomparable Flathead cherries, cars nosing out of steep lakeside driveways to peek onto the highway. A condominium rose next to its white reflection on the black, clean surface of the lake.

Frank pulled over and bought a couple of pounds of cherries and placed them on the seat next to him. He rolled the window down and spit the pits out as he drove until the hot buffeting wind made him feel deaf on that side. He rolled the window up and began spitting the pits onto the dashboard. He turned on the radio and listened to an old song called “Big John”: everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John. Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.

On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.” No one compares with this guy, thought Frank. I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it. Frank paused in his thinking, then realized he was suiting up for his arrival at Missoula. In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky, the voice of Sam Cooke: “But I do know that I love you.” Frank began to sweat. “And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be.” He turned off the radio, looked into the oncoming chrome grille of a White Freightliner and shouted, “My empire is falling!” Then he twisted the rearview mirror down so that he could study his own expressions. He now permitted himself to think about Gracie. He knew that she might be in Missoula and he wanted to be ready but he didn’t know how. He was nervous.

All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: “Give me water, my work is so hard.” What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead. Heading for a white world: polo shirts, imported beer. The back nine. Lawn care. Etiquette. Epstein-Barr. Then he thought with disturbance about trout fishing. Blacks didn’t seem to care about that. They liked fishing off bridges, though. It was hard to picture Otis Redding and Sam Cooke fishing off a bridge. Maybe they did before they were famous.

Holly’s apartment was on a small side street behind the university, about three blocks from the Clark Fork River. Frank first stopped at the river and watched it rush through town. There were some small trout dimpling along a speeding current seam about ten feet below traffic. Because of the previous night, Frank felt it was going to be out of the question to develop a truly huffy tone. But he meant to do his best. There were several cars parked in front: Holly’s green Civic, a well-kept old tan Mercedes 190SL and a National rental car with Utah plates. Next door, a pretty college girl was hanging out wet towels while a Louis Armstrong solo played its scratchy uproar from the windowsill. In the space between houses a steep hillside angled away, green and dotted with small white stones. Frank could smell the nearby paper mill and just make out the iron red top of a crane moving beyond the roofs of buildings. He felt faintly sick to his stomach.

The door to Holly’s apartment opened and instead of Holly, there was Gracie. That’s what he was afraid would happen. Frank was partway out of his car, still cushioned by the sounds of the radio as well as by the accidental moods of a neighborhood of temporary college housing; but it nearly stopped his heart, a feeling so intense it resembled fear more than anything else. He felt as if his brain were photographing everything in an exhausting superrealism that he couldn’t absorb. He was experiencing flu-like symptoms.

“Would it be better if I left?”

“As you wish, Gracie.” He could scarcely believe the bland tone of his voice.

“As I wish?”

“As you wish.”

“Okay, I’ll stay.”

For the second time in a weekend, Frank thought he had found himself in hailing distance of dramatic poontang. If nothing else, such a puerile thought was heartening in the face of his shakiness. He was swept under by self-contempt. He didn’t even have time to imagine who was the wronged party or, still worse, account for the water over the dam. He feared old rooted love more than anything else, blunt and tragic, like horrible news from the doctor.

“Gracie, how are you?” he asked, now at the door.

“I’m fine, Frank, and yourself?”

Bad English, thought Frank, but said, “I’m fine. Holly here?” Gracie sort of smelled his little thought and squinted before speaking. Her squint was perfect, eternal.

“Yes she is, Frank. And she’s with … Lane.”

“Who is Lane?” Frank asked, titrating just a bit of conspiratorial intimacy into his conversation. She stayed rigid. It didn’t appear she wanted much to do with him. He was a jerk.

“Lane is Holly’s gentleman friend. Shall we?” She backed away from the narrow screen door to let Frank into the hallway. Frank stepped in and then Gracie followed, a panicky situation in a small spot. There was a brass holder for umbrellas, to remind Frank that he was in a rainy area. Beyond a pair of divided-pane glass doors was the old parlor of the house, which Holly had furnished with junk shop furniture, including a folding card table, a cream-colored La-Z-Boy recliner, a television set with its futuristic insides exposed, cinderblock-and-board bookcases and a large public drinking fountain. On one wall was a poster so out of keeping that it startled Frank. It showed the bomber Enola Gay with the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima behind it, and underneath the legend “It’s Miller Time.” There was a miscellany of small, uncomfortable metal chairs in one of which, gesticulating feverishly, sat Holly, and in another a gaunt figure with a shock of gray curls, wearing a three-piece suit and lace-up cowboy packer boots, Lane Lawlor. He dressed the same way Frank’s grandfather had, only that was sixty years ago and the old fart had had a Maxwell touring car. Who was this costumed geezer courting his daughter? Frank wondered.

As he held out his paw, Lane Lawlor actually said to Frank, “Put ’er there.”

“Daddy,” said Holly, “this is Lane Lawlor.” She smoothed the front of her dress and shrugged up one shoulder. She shifted her look to Frank and said, “And Mama, she’s met.”

Gracie came in from behind and almost secretively found herself a chair. Everybody looked over at her and she reexplained, “We’ve met.”

Frank gazed at Gracie. Love had turned to rage. It came out in some rather sharp questioning of Lane.

“Where you from, Lane?”

“I’m from Fort Benton,” he said, “right where she all began.”

“Right where what all began?”

“The history of Montana, the fur trade and so on.”

“Oh, the white history of Montana.” This wasn’t quite fair, as it suggested subtextually that Frank spent a good bit of his time fighting for the rights of Indians. He really meant Otis Redding. “What’s your line of work?”

“Water.”

“A swimmer?”

“I’m an attorney. My practice is confined to water issues — apportionment, adjudication, priority and so on.”

“You’ve been at it several summers, I take it,” said Frank, allowing his eyes to drift to the gray curls.

“Sure,” said Lane, ready to take him on, which seemed to be looming.

Holly made a presentational gesture with both hands toward her mother. Her interest in Lane had made her into a bit of a simpleton. She had an expression of appalling devotion, a Nancy Reagan gaze directed at the side of his head. “Well, what do you think?” Holly asked.

“She looks well,” said Frank. He wasn’t controlling his projected tone very well. He was usually better at this. Either more was at stake or the background of his slipping business was seeping in. He tried it again. “She looks well.” This time it sounded as if he were saying she didn’t look well at all or was actually ugly.

“You look well too,” said Gracie.

“Thank you. Anytime.”

“Oooh,” said Gracie, and this almost got away from them. Holly was frozen. Frank noticed that Gracie was angry.

“You want to hear how we met?” Holly asked.

“Yuh,” said Frank. “How?”

“At a rally for We, Montana.”

“I’m terribly sorry, darling,” said Gracie, “but your father and I don’t know what that is.”

Despite his pleasure at Gracie’s figure of speech, Frank said grimly, “I know what it is.” We, Montana was an organization of citizens who hoped to keep any water from leaving the state, through the erection of dams and diversions. They had some reputed connection with the Posse Comitatus as well as the radical tax protesters of the Dakotas. They spoke to the press sardonically about their interest in “white water issues,” by which they meant water for white people. Frank especially remembered their Western Family archetypes: the John Wayne male and his bellicose, gun-toting woman, their cold-eyed, towheaded children.

“Then we started going to the pistol range together,” Holly said.

“Why were you going to the pistol range, darling?” asked Gracie.

“To be able to defend myself,” said Holly flatly. “I shoot two hundred rounds a week.”

“I never thought of you as being in danger,” said Frank.

“You’re not in danger,” said Holly, “until you develop a few convictions. I found that out. There are some very peculiar out-of-staters on campus that give you the feeling that happiness is a warm gun.”

“I guess that’s why we’ve been so safe,” said Gracie to Frank. She seemed lost by this new Holly. Frank was numb.

“I hope you’ll realize with what love I say this,” Holly said. “Your generation, especially with your own out-of-state experiences, has been pretty much bent on self-discovery. Something very different happens when standards enter into it.”

Frank missed something here. “What are out-of-state experiences, darling?”

Holly laughed. “Experiences outside of Montana!”

“Uh-huh. Just what it sounds like.”

Gracie turned slowly toward Lane. “Lane, do we have you to thank for this?”

“I’m not sure what ‘this’ is, but probably you have Holly to thank.”

“Mom, you’re not even from here!”

“Where are you from, Mrs. Copenhaver?” Lane asked quietly.

“Louisiana.”

“Louisiana,” mused Lane. “I’ve often heard how colorful it is.”

“Don’t be a wise guy,” said Gracie. “It’s a great place.” Lane bobbed his head agreeably. “You can get a soft-shell po’ boy there which sets it apart in my eyes.”

“I’ve heard a good deal about your organization, Lane,” said Frank. “What do you hope to accomplish? Elect some people?”

“First of all, it’s not my organization. We see ourselves equally vested in Montana. We don’t want to elect anybody. We simply wish to provide an atmosphere of accountability throughout the state.”

“Who’s trying to hide the water …”

“Exactly. That’s the magnetic issue which collects all the other iron filings. We take the position that no water leaves the state, period. That tells you all you need to know. It tells you who the tree huggers are, the wolf recovery sleazos, the grizzly kissers, the trout pinkos —” Frank glanced over to Holly to see if he had become a trout pinko. She looked straight back at him, through him.

“Uh, Lane. Some of the state is twelve thousand feet high and, uh, water goes downhill, as I remember. Seems like some of it’s going to leave the state.”

“Not if you impound it.”

“Not if you impound it …”

“Exactly.”

“But then all the streams and rivers would, would be impoundments, all the beautiful streams and rivers.”

Holly and Lane chanted at him, trying to help him see the light: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch!” This phrase must have held some philosophical importance to them.

“I met one of the wolf enthusiasts,” Frank said noncommittally.

“Those people — the birds, bees, wolf and buffalo people — need to know that Montana is not a zoo,” said Lane. He got up, went to the kitchen and came back with a plate of little reddish brown discs. It was elk jerky that he had made himself. He passed the plate around.

“I start every session of the legislature passing out jerky to my fellow Republicans.”

“We’re Democrats,” said Gracie. “What do you give Democrats?”

“A piece of my mind — no, just kidding. I try to give them a sense of our ideology. Liberals think a victimology is an ideology — just line up victims and the policy will dictate itself. T’ain’t so, McGee. There’s a way of looking at this world and this country and, more importantly, this state that begins with saddle leather and distance, unsolved distance. And water. American government is run on the squeaking wheel getting the grease. In Montana, we not only don’t need grease, we don’t need the wheel. We need water, and we’re going to keep every drop that’s ours.”

Frank was looking down at his disc of jerky, held between thumb and forefinger. He was trying to sink his nail into it while wondering what sort of family or town could produce a dipshit like this. Lane had the gleaming true-believer tone of a James Watt, but with his own beetling menace. It was the knowledge that people like this existed that made Frank really fear that he was losing some advantage in business. Given that Lane was dating Holly, Frank felt that if this were an Arab nation and he, Frank, were a middling sort of emir, he would go on ahead and have Lane beheaded. Maybe arrange to have the head fall into a bag so that Holly wouldn’t be traumatized. Have the headless corpse float out to sea after dark; try to do it in a thoughtful way. Maybe have an orchestra. So long, head.

Frank excused himself to use the bathroom, which was at the end of a corridor behind the steep stairwell. Lane followed him back there. Frank was surprised.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” he said.

“Just a quick word with you,” said Lane.

Frank stopped. “What is it?”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“About what, Lane?”

“About me and Holly?”

“As a couple?”

“As a couple.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-three.”

“You’re several decades older than Holly, Lane. I think that’s a bit extreme.”

“Don’t get yourself off the hook with that, Frank. What do you actually think?”

Frank appraised him for a moment, feeling challenged. “It’s not so much a matter of thinking, Lane. It’s more a feeling.”

“A feeling of what?”

“Of being sick to my stomach.”

Lane smiled evenly and said, “Fair enough.”

Frank went into the bathroom and closed the door, bouncing a douche bag that hung from a hook there. It looked like some tired thing from a yard sale. There were small porcelain fragments of an angel fastened to the wall, children’s towels with cowboy and Indian scenes on them, a sunburst on the toilet seat and a claw-foot tub. He realized that he didn’t need to use the bathroom and that the reflexive trip down the hallway to its door was out of hope that Gracie would follow for a heart-to-heart talk, bandied remarks or whispers of assignation. He was eager to tell her that he thought he had a real chance of going broke, but he didn’t want Lane or Holly to hear. He desperately wanted her to know that he might fail. Nevertheless, his short absence produced a change. When he got back to the living room, Gracie, Holly and Lane were standing. Holly had a class and Lane had to get back to the office. Frank heard each of these two before letting his eyes drift to Gracie. She was looking at him.

“I’m available for lunch,” she said, “if you are.”

Frank just smiled and offered a poor joke at departure. “I look forward to seeing you again,” he said to Lane, adding, “Don’t forget your annual physical.”

The women looked over at him in barely concealed astonishment. This was beyond the pale, even for Gracie.

“And you,” said Lane levelly.

“My family’s up and grown,” said Frank.

“Yippee,” said Lane. “By the way, I’ll be down in your town lecturing. You ought to come and see me, see my constituents, before your mind closes completely.”

“Boys, boys, boys,” said Gracie.

Lane stood without motion, made even taller by the lace-up boots that stuck out incongruously from the cuffless bottoms of his suit pants. Don’t want to get fooled by this arch-bumpkin livery, Frank thought; guy like that’d run a Dun and Bradstreet on you in a minute. Instead, he looked at his daughter, who had become a bit corn-fed, one of the few predictable effects of zealotry. As soon as he could get to a phone, he meant to offer her a trip around the world. Any horizon-broadening at all would reduce this Lane to a dot. Furthermore, he suspected it would be Gracie’s view that Lane was the sort of thing to be expected when Frank was functioning as a solo parent. If he could get her to a restaurant, he would disabuse her of that, big time.

They saw Lane to his pickup truck. Holly kissed her fingertips and reached through the window to touch Lane’s liver lips. Frank watched him bat his eyes in mock collusion; it was unbearable. Lane wound a gray curl around his forefinger and said to her, “So long, pard,” then nodded curtly to Frank and Gracie.

“Get us a table at the Red Lion and I’ll be along in just a minute,” Gracie said.

“Okay,” Frank said. He turned to Holly and squeezed her. “Bye, pet.” The embrace had become awkward. Holly was unresponsive.