Nothing but Blue Skies

46

He went back to his house and stood in the kitchen opening mail in his topcoat while canned chili heated on the stove. There was some junk mail for expectant parents that he threw across the room. He stared through the cooking steam to think. He was still embarrassed. Worse than embarrassed — humiliated. Yes, that was it, humiliated. He took off the topcoat but momentarily retained the hat. Noticing a smell from the coat, he took it into the next room. He was wondering about Gracie. He started to feel a little crazy, so he turned the heat down on the stove, made himself a drink and sat at the kitchen table with his mail. Wearing the hat gave him the feeling he could jump up and run outside if he so desired. He started with the financial forecasts. He wanted to rise above the day. The drink was good in every way, a warm fun-bomb with great healing powers.

Nothing all that wrong with the market, really. People were definitely looking for yield, as who could blame them. Frank was starting to unwind. He was going from live pigs to more of a macro picture. It was certainly the day of bond mutual funds. And nobody seemed to give a flying fuck if it was municipal or global. There was plenty to cheer in today’s gasoline futures. All sorts of signals out there that the Fed was easing rates. The ever exciting General Mills was bringing out a four-grain version of Cheerios, with the usual motive of kicking the shit out of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Good luck: this was the fourth tune-up of a serviceable fifty-year-old idea and Rice Krispies was still around. Try to get it into your heads, boys.

The chili was done and Frank removed his hat. There was then a ring at the front door. Frank thought, This could be good. He plunged his hands deep into his pockets and walked around the bottom of the staircase to the hall. He just knew it was going to be Gracie.

He looked out the window beside the front door. It was Phil, stroking his beard with one hand and ringing the doorbell with the other. Frank had a moment’s thought, which immediately struck him as unworthy, that he might pretend not to be home. Ignoring his friends would be a sign of total collapse and he wasn’t going to let it happen. He went up and opened the door. Recalling a habit of their high school days, they made deep Chinese bows and Phil came in.

“Want some chili?” Frank said, leading the way down the hall. “I just got in from a pig show.”

“Okay, if you got enough. A pig show?”

“I got enough. Yeah, I had to ride a pretty big one. I stayed on, made the whistle.”

Phil didn’t know what Frank was talking about. He didn’t like anything to do with farming, ranching, agriculture. His assumption was that every pig was a government rip-off, a harmless creature that occasioned subsidies and price supports and had no reality of its own. Until now, though, he didn’t seem to realize people rode them.

In the kitchen, Phil looked into the cooking pot. “You got a salad or anything?”

“Look in the fridge.”

Phil got some tired-looking vegetables out of the refrigerator and began paring away the bad spots. “My old lady finally flew the nest for good,” he said.

“I didn’t realize she was still technically around.”

“We were legally separated, but I finally decided to tell her about Smokie.”

“So, what’s going to happen?”

“I’ll make it.”

“That’s good,” said Frank, keeping it small. He didn’t know if he wanted to get into this. He thought Phil was a little premature on the Smokie issue. “Couples seem to be a thing of the past, which should help the housing market. Although I see new home starts are down.”

“What did you think about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill?”

“I wasn’t smart enough to follow it. I wouldn’t exactly call them a couple.”

“Look at what I’ve salvaged,” said Phil of the neat pile of salad ingredients.

The phone rang and Frank answered while gesturing approvingly at the vegetables. It was Jerry Drivjnicki calling to say that he realized that what happened wasn’t Frank’s fault.

“What’s past is past,” said Frank philosophically, yet wondering if his regular dry cleaner would take umbrage at the pigshit embedded in the camel’s hair.

“Olav Finberg won the darn thing,” said Jerry. “That’s when I began to think. He had two pigs in it and one was no good. In fact, that one pig was out of control. That was the one that took you for a ride. That pig couldn’t have won nothin’. After the wreck was over, Olav was standing there with his good pig, and the judge was so rattled he let Olav win.”

“Was Olav that farmer standing right behind me?”

“That’s Olav.”

Frank sighed. “Well, I tell ya, Jerry, I’m all pigged out. They seemed to fit when my life was in a different place, but that time is gone.”

“Frank, if the pigs ain’t doing for you what you want, I’ll get you back out. Just say the word.”

“I took it from you that it was over with today, Jerry. Let’s keep it that way.”

“Okay, Frank.”

Jerry hung up, then Frank hung up. Frank could tell by the way Jerry signed off that he was miffed. He hoped the next pig he saw was at a barbecue.

Phil said, “You got anything to drink?” This was clearly about the drink itself and also about need in general. The request was accompanied by a brief, solemn gaze that was made forlorn by Phil’s long beard. Frank knew what to make Phil, a simple bourbon and water; and he made himself one too. He was glad to see Phil, glad to take a moment out with a friend, a moment away from the linearity of his recent life to just do some simple drinking.

Phil wore a shirt that seemed to be made out of pillow ticking and Frank was reminded how he often thought Phil looked like a Gallatin County pioneer, maybe a small stock farmer or someone who sold whiskey to the Indians. He had that blank look he associated with local frontiersmen in photographs, which probably had more to do with the instructions of the photographer to not move and spoil the portrait than it did with the actual personalities of the subjects. From that, Frank, like most people, had surmised that a bleak view of the world prevailed a hundred years ago. If it weren’t for their written materials, which revealed a new Eden, this great technological breakthrough would have maligned them for all time. Phil looked like a victim of photography; Frank knew he was full of enthusiasms but he didn’t let them show very much.

“Frank, I didn’t have a great week.” They were in the front sitting room, one of the fussy, semi-formal spaces in this Victorian house that Frank and Gracie had bought out of a piety about the olden days. It had one inconvenient room after another. They had never known where to put Holly, from infancy through childhood and high school years. It was an atmospheric setting for some thoroughly ersatz elements of their life as a family: tall-ceilinged rooms with heavy-metal band posters, a sewing room filled with sporting gear, family recipes on the word processor, microwave Cajun cookbooks, mountain bikes in the front hall. This evening, you could see the place eating at Phil in the form of discomfort as the poor bastard tried to find a soft spot in a seventy-two-year-old wing chair.

“Smokie left too,” he said.

“How are you taking all this?”

“I’ll live,” said Phil.

Frank saw a tremor in his face. “Phil, is there anything I can do?” he said after a moment. Abruptly, Phil began to weep. Frank felt an ache go through him, a helpless surge, and it was awkward. Through the racking sobs and streaming tears, Phil must have perceived Frank’s discomfort. He began waving at him. Frank thought he was being told to do something but he couldn’t make out what. The phone began to ring. Frank decided not to answer it. Phil clamped his hands on the arms of the chair and sank into it. His whole body was jerking while the phone rang. “Turn on the radio,” Phil moaned. “I gotta get out of this.”

Frank turned on the country station. A reverent interview with Dolly Parton from Dollywood, her theme-park home, was in place. The two men began to listen. Phil had difficulty but he was paying attention. Evidently, “country” was where “family” counted; references to the Mama figure and the Daddy figure. You could feel her dimples come over the airways. And now for the vibrato that built it all, sassy and dramatic, equally at home in Appalachia and Rodeo Drive: “The Coat of Many Colors.” As though each man were assigned one of Dolly’s big breasts, the room grew calm. They gazed off in comfortable friendship, the ghastly weeping now subsided into tolerable ungainliness. They sucked down the bourbon.

“How did we get in so many wrecks, Frank?”

“Jeez, Phil, I’m stuck. How’s the chili?”

“It’s good. I feel better. I mean, I feel like an asshole but I feel better. I didn’t mean to get so upset. I guess I figured I could. We been in a lot of corners before. I guess I had it coming. Before Kathy, I turned some nice kids into whores. Course, I had to be one too, to do it. Used to take them in the caboose all the way to Forsythe, supposed to be watching for fires along the track, and we’d be rolling numbers and having us a big old time. Lucky old Smokie didn’t give me the chance to do it to her. Part of me is proud of it. So, if you’re never gonna grow up anyway, might as well have a good cry.”

“I’ve been reading where it’s supposed to be good for you,” said Frank. “Men are starting to get into it. All around the country.”

“Do you do it?”

“Not much.”

Phil sighed. “I’m gonna get me a big, grateful, coyote-ugly type of gal one of these days and settle down for the long haul.”

It was quiet for a moment.

“I suppose we ought to eat something at some point.”

“I don’t know about this chili. You can sort of taste the can.”

Frank set two fresh drinks on the table with a significant clunk. A sudden light from passing cars shuddered on the walls. There was a pile of newspapers he hadn’t gotten to. These sorts of things acquired a strangeness when you were living alone. Your sense of adventure goes into your marriage, and when the marriage is gone you’re stuck with a hundred versions of a road map when you’re not planning a trip. Frank bobbed his ice cubes with his forefinger and smiled to himself. A lot of men in the news these days blubbering. It was supposed to be the sign of a real man, but it just didn’t look right to Frank. Although with Phil it seemed okay.

Phil had been talking: “… Plus — plus — shit.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s hopeless with women, Phil?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Any women?”

“That’s been my experience.”

“Is your wife going to live with that doctor?”

“I doubt it. She’s just graduated to one of his little somethings on the side. That’s a hell of a category, isn’t it? But that’s what she wants to be.”

“You care for some of these newspapers?”

“Naw.”

“I don’t know what my wife is up to either. She just seems to be circling the airport. She’s sort of around again, and to be perfectly honest it makes me nervous.”

“I don’t know what the fuck they want,” Phil said.

“Nervous and sad and crazy. I don’t know quite what it means. I was going to think about it tonight. I always figure these things out just before I go to sleep. But with men and women, it seems everyone wants the authorities to intervene. You sort of picture lawsuits being the ideal relationships of the future. At least you can kind of let it happen.”

“Run up some bills.”

“I’m not saying it’s a way to cut costs in a relationship.”

“My wife and I don’t have that kind of money,” Phil said. “We’re old-fashioned. We’d just like to kill each other.”

“The last time I felt really close to Gracie, well, we were going to open a burger joint, something different, something with a slogan, and what it was going to be about was volume sales. I was just thinking numbers. But Gracie, who’s a great cook, thinks whatever you do should be good for the world, whereas I just like business. And I honestly mean it when I say that when Amazing Grease went upside down I didn’t gloat because she did serve really distinctive food while it lasted. And it was like anything she did for good reasons was doomed and anything I do for my usual money-grubbing motives would succeed. It was really humiliating to Gracie. We never actually said it. It was like her view of life was nowhere because she couldn’t face what a paltry, hopeless deal it was and I could. But the funny thing is, since she withdrew in defeat and just let the lesson speak for itself, I haven’t been able to do as well either. Or I don’t want to. Or I fail to see what it means. Or, whatever.”

Phil wore a pinched, inward look. He had both hands around his drink. He seemed to be watching something inside himself. He lifted the drink up and finished it. “I gotta go,” he said.

“Phil, is everything okay?”

Phil was up and next to the door. “I really can’t answer that question.”

Frank knew better than to follow him out the door. Instead, he brought the television in so he could see it while he ate. The Broncos. Elway goes back, back, uncorks a Hail Mary … incomplete. He finished his drink and made one more because he could just begin to feel that good old mellow feeling: the coexistence of life’s elements as so successfully seen through the bottom of a glass. He smiled at the wholesome chili. He thought with sweet sadness of his pain and Phil’s pain, all the while knowing they were learning something important. He forgot the overpowering sense that nothing is learned, that this is a circle and a headache in which the nerves of the abdomen are counterweighted by the capacity for remorse. For example, he contemplated with a faint, annunciatory smile the idea that nothing really was important.