Nothing but Blue Skies

35

He sat with his fishing tackle at the great corrugated base of a black cottonwood tree whose broad and leafy branches shaded an undercut run. He rolled over on his back and watched the big white clouds, barely moving toward the east, drifting on in a unit against the insistent deep blue of the sky. This seemed to him to be a grand and wholly acceptable arcade where his various sins were simply booths to be revisited with amusement. He wondered how Dante had failed to perfect one of his circles for the philandering sportsman: ravaged by his own hounds, flogged with his own fishing poles, dancing over his own buckshot. He joyously felt himself idling, an unreflective mood in which water was water, sky was sky, breeze was breeze. He knew it couldn’t last.

He got up and strung his rod together and in a minute he was in the river with a box of flies in his shirt pocket. He could barely sense his business behind him, spinning toward failure. He didn’t even have waders but was comfortable in the summer flow. The river was low and the gravel bars were prominent. He moved along until he could find some fish feeding. There was nothing going on where he had slept, in the deep run, though surely there were fish there. Nothing in the sparkling tail-out below the next big pool. But in a slender side channel he saw a string of fish feeding on flying ants.

Did he have a flying ant imitation in his fly box? He looked and yes, he did. He tied it on and made a very cautious presentation to the most downstream fish. The fish took in a silver swirl that faintly betrayed the colors of its flanks. Frank gave it some slack; the fish dropped back where it couldn’t scare its fellows and in a minute was in hand, an East Slope cutthroat, a rare bird on this river. He let that one go and eased up on the next and caught it, a little butterball brown trout that jumped four times. He hooked the next one; he could see it was a brown trout by the yellow flash as it took his fly down. A smart fish, it moved up through the others, scared them off, bolted and broke the fine leader.

Two hours had gone by. Frank crawled up on the bank, pushing his rod ahead of himself, and when on dry land, rolled over to face the sun and dry off. A slight shadow went through his mind as he reflected that this was Wednesday, conventionally viewed as a workday. But this soon passed. Work? The question chilled him. He’d better figure that out fast. He’d better work for something or quit taking up room. Though what was wrong with taking up room? He hadn’t asked to be put in this position. He was a byproduct of his parents’ sex life unless, given those austere times, he was the entire product. Hard to picture from the current carnival.

The worst was that he had been “meant” for someone and now he was not “meant” for anyone. His fear was that if he was not meant for anyone, then it might follow that he wasn’t meant for anything. He wasn’t a scientist or an artist. He was just a businessman, really. Still, he believed that he asked the big questions. He knew that scientists and artists believed that only they asked the big questions. They believed it was their job to ask the questions the answers to which the general population required for their well-being, but never asked themselves. Why? Because, it would seem to follow, the general population was too fucking stupid. This belief was behind the impression that artists and scientists often made among ordinary people, of being blowhards, or assholes. He admitted loving his bouts of brainlessness: the fish tight against the rod, the strange woman smiling across the corridor as the light from the Coke machine shone on her lipstick, the dog barking beyond the railroad tracks. When you analyzed something, it owned you. You ought, as the Bible suggested, to watch, and wait. Frank smiled at his own thoughts, rolled onto his stomach and watched the river.

By the time he got to the office, several things had changed. First, he had certainly come to realize that he was going to have to take hold of practical matters while he could. He pretended that his emotional hegira had been a kind of renewal, but his body and the vague feeling of being stunned denied that. He had evidently recovered his old abstracted yet purposeful self because his secretary had lost her sardonic aura and fell right in behind the renewal of his routines. There was a mausoleum tidiness about his desk that implied absence and neglect of business.

Second, he was coming down with something. Eileen told him it was going around. He felt shaky, and there was the sense that sweats were not far away. Aspirin was wearing off about every two hours but work had to be done. He began to look at his activities: his antagonizing the renters at the clinic, his gross failure to track the cattle market, his open boredom when talking about the fate of the family ranch. He felt he was awakening from hypnosis. What in God’s name could I have had in mind? he wondered.

And finally, he had learned in a phone call from his daughter, marked by a coolness he had never experienced from her before and which was so baffling to him that it had the effect of overshadowing the information it conveyed, that Gracie had returned to town and would be living on Third Street with her friend Edward. She, Holly, would be down for a visit, and to accompany Lane at one of his Brandings.

This made things neither better nor worse. Gracie had left him and the finality of that blow could not, he was sure, be increased by her being in town. At least he didn’t think so. There would be the pain of running into her. But how often did he run into anyone by accident? There would be a powerful temptation to slip over to her place at night and see what was going on. But he was going to stop all that, or if he didn’t stop, he would resume his observation of conventional families pursuing a long-shared idea in our country, one he had lost.

“Eileen, have you been following the fortunes of this Centennial Wolf Pack?”

“I think they killed them all except one.”

“Who killed them all except one?”

“Whoever. They don’t know.”

“How many were there?” Frank asked.

“There were six, weren’t there? There was the black female, the mother — the one they called Alberta because that’s where she was supposed to come from. They shot her —”

“Who?”

“They don’t know,” Eileen said. “The senator said that environmentalists were shooting them to make ranchers look bad.”

“Then they poisoned the male, I believe. Two pups were shot off the highway. How many does that leave?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Copenhaver, they poisoned that other pup at the campground over in the Gallatin. I believe the senator explained that the Bozeman Girl Scout troop might’ve done that to help protect fawns. Although I heard the Girl Scouts denied it and their troop leader wasn’t real happy about the senator. So, there’s just one, and he’s this real silvery male they had on TV going across the Cayuse Hills. He’s almost grown. They’ve got a radio collar on him. Fish and Wildlife says he’s doing great.”

“He might be a little lonely, wouldn’t you think?”

“A wolf?”

“Anyway, I have a friend who’s been following the wolves. It’s a passion with her. I haven’t seen her in a while …”

Eileen looked on with vague incomprehension. She wasn’t big on these lateral, associative kinds of things. He’d been through this before. Anything beyond the declarative sentence aroused a suspicion in her that a plot was afoot. And in his case there was, a plot to locate Smokie.

“You don’t look very well, Mr. Copenhaver.”

“I’m afraid I’m just hanging on. But I can’t give in to it. I’ve neglected so much.”

“You have indeed,” said Eileen. “I’m very worried for my job.”

Frank took this in, looking at her to gauge the depth of her worry. But Eileen stranded him. She didn’t exactly wear her heart on her sleeve. Frank had a split second of admiring the consistency of her out-of-fashion clothing, eyeglasses that made her as unattractive as possible, pale plastic-rimmed things that were a pure optometric solution to seeing poorly.

“You won’t lose yours unless I lose mine,” said Frank heartily.

“That’s what I mean,” she said.

“I see,” said Frank. Once he saw this all from a great altitude. His benevolence in directing his widespread world was immediately accepted for the simple fact that he was in motion and provided a kind of leadership. He had learned that people will follow damn near any moving object, but that if it falters, they will quickly move to another moving object and follow that one. He once read an essay by Robert Benchley describing a newt falling head over heels in love with a pencil eraser because it resembled something in the mind of all newts. Frank once thought of this as a very complete description of human love.

Next Frank talked to John Coleman, his accountant, the man who once crowed, “You’re a success!” at the crossing of some threshold of net worth or another. He could tell that John was even more worried. Well, Frank was worried too. In fact, he knew so much more than John that he was inclined to overreact to John’s worry. John had a deep, measured voice that he cultivated purely for phone use. He rarely used that phone voice on Frank, but now he was, candidly nattering on about a few accounting strategies — he knew Frank was not interested. Evidently, he had bumped into Edward Ballantine on the street and gotten some very aggressive questioning as to whether Frank was deliberately devaluing his estate by way of anticipating his divorce. All that was meant to say was that this was now street knowledge and, accurate or inaccurate, it was hardly a salubrious business climate.

“Frank,” he said, “I think you are perilously close to failure.” This would have had greater effect if John hadn’t used the phone voice, but it had some effect. “If a divorce is impending, then what I say is certainly true.”

Frank didn’t want to let any of these people get to him. “I think I’m coming down with something,” he said.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“I mean a bug. I got a flu shot but this one flies below radar.”

“Failure,” said John. “It’s almost like getting killed.”

When he got off the phone, Frank tried to think about having nothing and couldn’t respond to the idea. He’d had prosperity for a good little while now and obviously it hadn’t done enough for him to form a background for terror when he contemplated its absence. He tried it on himself: “I am a failure.” Nothing.

He made himself have a productive day, getting the most important mail out and returning the calls of those who were angriest or most offended. He did not talk to the bank. He was not prepared for any more of a bottom-line view than he had acquired from John Coleman. Then he went home and went to bed. He was sick.

He woke up at about eight P.M. and was still sick, but he was hungry. He had wound up the bedclothes in a twisted confusion and he was sweating. The phone rang and it was a wrong number, some old man. He found himself trying to prolong the conversation but it was, he concluded, the result of fever confusing him about how long things took. He thought he was simply not rushing when the old man said, “Look, mister, this is a wrong number. You follow me? I can’t talk to you all night.”

“You’ve got to go,” Frank said. It was attempted wit. He hung up the phone and rolled over. There was still some light coming in through the curtain on the high window. The curtain made it gray and Frank lay looking at the gray light on his hands. He tried to pretend they were someone else’s hands. What sort of person were they the hands of? He couldn’t tell. They were just hands. He was sinking into despair.

Maybe a shower. He let the hot water run straight into his face, trying to get some feeling back. This is like twenty gallons of tears a minute, he reflected as the water surged down off his chin. He tried shampoo, half a handful of golden gel. It swelled his hair into a foaming white crown. He took a piss this way, white-headed, hot water in the face, pissing against the wall. There was this movie scene, she was blowing him in the shower, suds, hot water, some crosscutting between orgasm and the water going down the drain, various arty annoyances. Then the movie went on to something completely different.

When he got back into bed he thought, My mother and father didn’t love me. What would a psychologist say? Probably, Oh, Frank, they loved you; they just didn’t love you in the right way. I don’t buy this about love, Frank would say to the psychologist. You’re worse than an asshole blowhard artist, you psychologist. Love is the right way. If it isn’t “the right way,” it isn’t love.

He was at an abyss of self-pity and he knew it but couldn’t seem to get around it. Sick and alone. If this was a preview, it was altogether frightening. It didn’t help to be so much cleaner. And in a moment, he was back in the bathroom to throw up. Afterward, he brushed his teeth but he couldn’t get the taste of vomit out of his mouth. He tried turning on the television. He was lonely and his accountant had said he was failing. His mother and father didn’t love him. That last fish broke his fly off. Darryl showed that he was a bigger man than Frank was. Lucy would have liked him if he could have just figured out who Lucy was so that he could do something in return. “Travel agent” wasn’t much of a beginning.

He got a thermometer and lay in silence, the covers pulled up under his chin, the glass rod sticking out only an inch from his lips. He had a fever of about 103. That was a pretty good fever. He got up and put on a bathrobe and a sweater over it. He went downstairs and drank a quart of milk with a marmalade sandwich and went back to bed. His hands were sticky. He lay there trying to remember the details about the marmalade. He had read the label. There was something about Seville oranges. It was foreign marmalade, but there was something about the family who made it that he had read and this was now completely gone from his mind. Maybe he was getting Alzheimer’s disease.

On the other hand, he remembered his first joke and there was a connection. He’d heard it from his Brooklyn-born barber when he was a kid. Somebody put an orange in a robin’s nest and when the young birds came back, one said to the other, “Look at the orange Mama laid.” In the barber’s accent, it sounded the same as “orange marmalade.” There was a time when he thought that was a really fine joke.

Many people he had talked to on the phone, before he came home, used the phrase “What are you going to do about …” Frank thought about this locution as though it were a specimen phrase from a foreign language. It seemed to imply that the person addressed was a kind of lever or something. He wished to state that he was no lever; he was a bystander, and on days he felt a little better, a pedestrian. He thought of himself and Holly singing “Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” and he began to weep in silent bitterness. People magazine was always talking about the glitterati. Well, he belonged to the bitterati. This thought caused him to burst out in a laugh, but snot flew from his nose onto the bed covers. He wasn’t about to be overpowered by snot, and so, covering first one nostril, then the other, he recklessly blew snot all over everything, then lay back in thought. This was meant to show he didn’t care about anything. He turned on the radio next to the bed, at low volume, and fell asleep.