Nothing but Blue Skies

50

“You’ll have to sit up.” He opened his eyes and there was Lucy with his dinner on a tray. He was woozy from codeine but glad to see her. She was wearing a pure white linen blouse and skirt. It seemed a miracle to find the only person he knew who lived in this peculiar zone.

“It’s like being in the hospital,” he said with a puzzled smile. He hoped he would seem to be referring to something far larger.

“You might as well be in the hospital.”

“Where’s your nurse’s costume?”

“Very funny.” She pinched his cheek. “Very funny.”

She put the tray on his lap. It looked appetizing: a breast of chicken encrusted with some herbs, butter beans, half a roasted yam, a little salad, quite nice indeed.

“Are you eating?” Frank asked.

“I already ate. I’ve got stuff to do.”

She moved as if to go. Mouth full, Frank raised his hands to stop her. He tried to say “Stay for a moment,” but the yam caused it to come out very differently. A crease of annoyance appeared between Lucy’s eyebrows, partly concealed by her extraordinarily precise bangs. He plucked orange specks of yam from his blanket and swallowed with an audible gulp. “I was hoping perhaps you might stay and visit for a moment.” He was conscious of a sluggish spasm moving the yam down his gullet while he tried to suavely murmur a few niceties.

“Gracie said I could bring your dinner because no one else planned to. But she said that if I hung around for quote a little tête-à-tête unquote, she would quote tear my fucking face off unquote.”

Frank’s spirits were careening wildly. He considered himself completely recovered except for the small matter of the blinding headache and faint codeine buzz. He was ashamed to realize that it was but a matter of time before his crooked heart was consoled by Lucy finding a way to have sex with him. They seemed to have an odd lack of control over this. Waiting for the inevitable, Frank marveled druggily at the curious way women betrayed each other. It seemed wildly at odds with their stated policies. His sluggish perceptions took this in voluptuously.

Lucy was fussing with the curtains now. Soon she would be carried toward him by an invisible conveyor belt. She had raised Gracie as a menace not to herself but to both of them. Lewd conduct, like teenage love, required abstract opponents to reach full flower. Frank allowed his silence to become loaded silence. With hieratical signification he moved the tray, with its burden of pimpled chicken skin, rind of yam and sheen of salad dressing, to the table beside the bed. Moronic speechlessness found its counterpart in a faint smile of Lucy’s. Frank thought, I have won the toss and elected to receive.

The blast of a car horn outside seemed to announce the beginning. Vague and adrift, Frank permitted the uncoiling of his cock until its jaunty presence was visible through the sheet. He put his hand up Lucy’s skirt with a boardinghouse reach. Lucy was like a tree shedding its leaves in the fall. She stood naked beside the bed knowing he was now helpless. I suppose she’s having a good time, he thought absently; and now comes the “tally me banana” part. She mounted him in reverse, a position that enabled her to watch the street. She was shivering, then hooting faintly like an owl in the brush. He held her buttocks so as to participate in their motion. By spreading them slightly, he was able to take a more precise measure of their activity, concluding that the vertical travel of the asshole, which seemed so dramatic, was actually only a matter of inches. Then came her voice. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was not the dragonish bellow that sometimes announced the onset of her orgasm. It seemed to be a call-and-response thing, more than one voice in spirit, high and low or, more properly, here answered by there. Then Lucy shouted without much of what Frank took as conventional passion, “I’m coming!” But before Frank could join her in ecstasy, she had climbed off him and was standing next to the bed, getting back into her clothes in a hurry. There had indeed been two voices: Lucy’s and, from the bottom of the stairs, Gracie’s. “I’m coming as fast as I can!” Lucy yelled down to the first floor in a fearful rage.

Gracie appeared in the bedroom doorway and, fixing Frank with a metallic smile, said, “How could you?” Lucy finished dressing, staying well out of Gracie’s reach, and they both went downstairs. He felt unwilling to breathe.

There was an immediate uproar from below. For several moments, Frank was certain that it was composed entirely of voices; then he wasn’t so sure. Worse, he felt it was getting closer, possibly moving up the stairs. He sensed that this emotional violence favored his situation, if he lived through it. But this ill-construed tone seemed to follow him everywhere like a pox. He knew the two women were in pain, but the only thing he thought he could offer was the suggestion that they ought to dump their growth stocks and get in on these tax-free Montana highway bonds while there was still time. He saw right away that there was no chance they’d listen. They’d probably just get madder.

“It is typical of the situation we held on to for so long,” Gracie was saying, “that anything we try turns into chaos.” She was working her way down the clothesline at the side of the house on Third, clothespins under her chin, hanging out sheets, towels and Edward’s voluminous boxer shorts. “I have not been back for long, but all the harrowing scenes of my recent history have taken place in that short time and they have all involved you in one way or another.”

“Did I tell Holly to accompany Hitler on the piano?” Frank said.

“He’s not Hitler. He’s not good, but he’s not Hitler.”

“Sorry. I know what you’re saying. Honey, you were great out there.”

“Gee, thanks. I especially wish that we could do as Edward suggests: meet in a civilized way and make sure we have left clean wounds so that the healing process can begin.”

“I’m very suspicious of this ‘healing’ concept,” Frank said. “I’ve heard a good bit about it lately and it always leads into a discussion of some unbelievably tedious ‘inner journey.’ I’m afraid I’ve grown much too old for that sort of thing. The messages of my formative years all came from Little Richard, who has never soiled himself with an inner journey.”

Gracie was unwarmed by these genial maunderings. “I wouldn’t know. I’m the bimbo who tried to sell Creole cuisine to the locals, remember?”

“You just fell down on your market research. Trail mix is the local soul food.”

Frank kept on watching Gracie hang her wash. Did this mean she didn’t own a dryer? Maybe Edward liked the smell of fresh air in his linens. These days people would do such things out of a vision of a simpler America.

Frank was looking at the clothespins, wondering how much longer they would last. He watched Gracie with endless appreciation of her concentration, her standing on tiptoes and, almost unbearably, the way, when she finally finished what she was doing, she used her thumbs to move her hair back behind her ears; that, or the way she saw him noticing. There was a momentary sense of everything else having stopped, a kind of silence, breathlessness.

Then it all came back: who he thought he was, who he thought she was, who she thought she was, who she thought he was; how, in the best case, it might well be mostly behind them, the flat earth on which much is irrevocable. Even the bad years, he thought, even the years of psychobabble and attacking each other with the previous night’s dreams. He had despised all those poetic nature books she read with topics like “impromptu clamming” as a spiritual exercise. And she had said he had no values, not even hippie values, that he came from the world of Grain Belt beer, novelty sex and car worship, from a hick town in a hick state. We are not people, he thought, we are envoys. Seek a postponement.

Yet, when she was in front of him, close, close enough to touch, she asked him, without raising her eyes to his, “Frank, if I asked you to do something, would you consider it?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Anything?”

Frank felt his heart lock. “Anything,” he said. Gracie lifted her face and looked into his eyes. Anything, he thought.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Wait a minute, what do you want me to do?”

“You already said you would.”

“But what is it?”

“Frank, I want you to meet with Edward. I think you need to fill in all the blanks. I think you’re losing it, Frank. I think you better find out what’s what and go from there. You already gave me your reply,” said Gracie with a little curtsey. “Bye for now.” She went into the house, stopping in the doorway to say, “Remember what a good sport I’ve been about you fucking that sorry whore in my old spindle bed.”

Frank was going to speak but the door was now closed. Instead of an arch that embowered their conversation, it was now the bald front of a house. And the road to finality was clear as daylight.

The Kid Royale Hotel and chicken farm was being picketed by the Preservation League. It was a beautiful day for picketing, with a bright sky filled with bright nimbus clouds and a gentle breeze from the west that carried a smell of lawns, a superb day for protest. Frank had known it was only a matter of time until they got here. One young woman walked up and down in front of the hotel in a sandwich board while she read a book. The sign said:

STOP FRANK COPENHAVER

FROM BURYING OUR PAST

IN CHICKEN DROPPINGS

“I’m Frank Copenhaver,” he said as he passed her by. “Why don’t you put a group together and buy me out? I could use the money.”

“Yeah, right. You’re a tycoon, mister.”

“I was getting there all right, but my bank says I’ve failed. Now I want to join you in the granola underworld.”

Without looking up from her book, she said, “This is harassment. Another word and I’ll turn your ass in.”

A blast of odor greeted Frank when he opened the door. He held it open long enough so that he could picture the invisible progress of the smell onto the sidewalk. There were few pedestrians but they reacted physically to its arrival with shrinking movements and rapid gaits. Here comes your regional heritage, Frank thought, on the wings of a dove. The picketers might well decide to do their work in the form of meditative petitions issued from fern-filled quarters in another part of town.

Frank was thrilled to step into the lobby and hear the racket of Orville Conway and his family, two tall boys and his big freckled wife with a scarf tied over her head. They greeted him and kept working; as he wandered through the building, he saw them nailing up chicken wire, running PVC pipe in the hallways to water the birds, rigging doors and corner roosts. One boy was hauling chicken feed and oyster shells in heavy sacks that hung from his broad shoulders while his mother guided a push broom down the corridors. The younger boy, wearing a Walkman, ran a nail gun as he secured the wire with lath strips. Over the din of their work, a cultivated voice chanted outside through a bullhorn a rhyme about it being no mystery what chickens do to history. The second floor, meanwhile, was completely up and running. Orville took Frank down the chicken-wired, doorless rooms filled with genial chickens greeting Frank with a wave of complaisant clucks. Orville looked upon them with admiration, a few strands of blond hair spilling from his wide head.

“I believe we’re to where we can see it might work,” he said.

“I’m excited about this, Orville.”

“The wife and I, we was hoping.”

“You’re all working so hard, I’m just glad to be in partners with you.”

“Them folks in front ain’t no bother. They’ll get tired pretty quick. We used to sell them organic chickens at the farmers’ market. One old gal pulled this dressed chicken’s legs apart and give it a sniff and told the missus it wasn’t fresh. The missus said, ‘Hell lady, Marilyn Monroe couldn’t pass that test.’ Us, we don’t get tired. Me, Shirl, nor them boys. We call them folks out front died-again Christians.”

Frank wandered around and tried to convey his enthusiasm to the Conway family and walked back outside through the picketers.

“It’s a changing world,” said one wise male picketer in long dreadlocks.

Frank told him, “It’s a fact, Jack.”

Then he got in his car and drove out to the town of Impact to pick up his scale receipts for his yearlings. He never had gotten them and it looked as if he’d need a mountain of paper to slow that bank down. On the narrow paved road, he passed a small buck that had been hit by a car, its head angled back sharply; its antlers lay on the pavement about fifteen feet away. There were several vertical, ribbed white clouds in the blue sky that looked like the afterimages of spinning tops. A truck went by with a license plate that read, “44 MAG.”

He picked up his receipts from the woman who ran the general store. He bought the Sun because of its interesting headline, BABY STOLEN FROM MOM’S WOMB WHILE SHE SLEEPS, and the Enquirer, which reported that Bill Cosby was working on his own test tube baby, and which revealed that Sonny Bono’s memoirs stated several important things about Cher: A, she was a lousy lover; B, she was so stupid she thought the moon was part of the sun; and C, she had been unfaithful with certain members of his band.

Frank remembered being out here long ago, grossly loaded, having to follow “Lewis and Clark Trail” signs the state had erected just to get home. He drove through the low, undulating hills covered with sagebrush and serviceberry bushes. Lightnin’ Hopkins sang on the radio, “You know my little woman ain’t no Mexican…,” making Frank daydream of his own true love, now connected to him by a thread. His mind was in ribbons thinking of all their trials on this lonesome road. White hair in five minutes.

But out there, all around, was his god of handsome land. As it leveled off before the car, other country flowed into it from his past: the cedar breaks and cotton fields of Texas, the big sun there and softer clouds, cotton wagons behind tractors, little caliche roads, senderos, heading off to pumping stations in the distance … twenty-four-year-old Gracie next to him, trying to find something good on the radio. The old man in the service station looked affectionately at the two of them and said, as a kind of invitation, “If you ever wear out a pair of boots in west Texas, you’ll never leave.” Now Frank’s tear ducts clamped like little fists and tears poured down his cheeks. He rested his teeth on the steering wheel and tried to see the road through swimming eyes. It had been so good.