Nothing but Blue Skies

9

Frank watched the small television set atop the dresser while he shaved. A new “young country” singer was performing, his long curls falling out from beneath his ten-gallon hat. “Put a futon on your wish list,” he hog-called into the microphone while his hair fell over his harmonica rack, “I’m kicking you tonight!” Perhaps it was very good music. He simply didn’t know anymore. It could be great.

He turned off the television set. Then he sat down and thought about the previous night, the previous brief evening and its lovemaking, which might well have been less an episode of spontaneity than an unfolding of earlier matters, something fearful, a sort of cowering behind one’s loins for want of a better idea. Not like the old days of rear back and let it rip. In these times, there was a surfacing of themes, the collision of culture, a pilfering of one’s own existence to direct dial three abdominal nerves. Life itself, thought Frank wearily, and at these prices!

From his shower, Frank could see lights on in a few houses, but most of the roofs from his angle huddled in the dark of their trees, scarcely outlined by moonlight. He felt he was up alone with the news crews of New York.

He dressed and went outside. It had been a warm night and the air was filled with the smell of juniper and damp garden beds. The sidewalk shone slightly, and as the road mounted the hill toward the south, the houses were raised in increasing angularity until they stood silhouetted at the crown against the stars and foothills.

He walked into the dining room of the Holiday Inn and waited for a seat. There was one gentleman reading USA Today, a Northwest Airlines crew of pilots and stewardesses, and June Cooper. Frank hoped the waitress would take him to an empty table before June spotted him, but no such luck. She seemed to realize that that might have been his hope and flagged him to her table grimly. Frank went over and sat down.

“Join me,” she rasped. “You don’t have that many friends, at least not at this hour.” June was a striking forty-year-old with almost black hair and blue eyes, an amazing combination. She had blown in from Oklahoma twenty years before as a veterinarian’s assistant, gone through three marriages to three previously married men and ended up with a successful Buick agency of her own, a gleaming single-story showroom and office that scattered its inventory of sparkling Buicks across one of the most valuable commercial lots in town. Her last husband hadn’t made much of it, and it seemed, after a decade and a half as a barracuda, June’s real gift was in running a business. She once told Frank, “The way I was raised, the only business open to women was marriage. I opened a chain. Right?”

“If you don’t want to sit with me,” she drawled, “don’t have breakfast at the Holiday Inn. I eat here every day.”

“Got you.” He liked June very much but she was so shrewd that he feared her seeing how dilapidated his spirit had become since Gracie left.

The waitress arrived and filled Frank’s coffee cup.

“He’ll have bacon and eggs and hash browns,” June said. “Eggs over lightly.”

He nodded. “I ought to eat a bowl of cereal.”

“You can have cereal at home. This is where we turn our backs on the things we do at home.”

Frank looked around the room, gathered in the footloose merriment of the Northwest crew, the bleak movements of the waitress, noted the silver cast of the windows as sunrise commenced. He lifted his coffee cup.

“How’s your love life, June?”

“I’m sublimating. And you?”

Frank thought, actually thought, about his current situation. He could hardly tell her that after learning he had peered at her from an apple tree, Lucy had virtually shipped him to the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, he told her the truth: “My love life is nonexistent too.”

“I don’t love anyone,” said June, pulling the little square of foil off the marmalade container. “Life is a highway and love is the potholes. I don’t say it’s good, but that’s how it is.”

“How about the Buick Family? I see on television there’s this nationwide thing called the Buick Family.”

“I don’t love them piss-ants neither.”

“So what do you do?”

“Occasionally, I get some sleepy type to go to bed with me. There is a burst of excitement but then they sense my needs are fairly much physical, and that’s all she wrote. We get a good bit of turnover. I do try to keep several of these donkeys on line, however.”

Frank’s breakfast arrived. “What about surrogate children?”

“I still have that dog, what’s his name, Jake. I still have Jake. I’d hardly call Jake a surrogate child. He’s supposed to be a trained retriever. But what is there to retrieve in my life except possibly self-esteem, and I can hardly expect Jake to do that. I have a niece at Oklahoma State, a real bum. She tried to work me for a car, but it didn’t take and I no longer hear from her.”

“Everyone used to have one of those overtrained water dogs. They were socially required.”

“Exactly, Frank. I noticed that when I came up from Oklahoma, but to no avail. I married three duck hunters in a row. Quack, bang, quack, bang. Such a life.”

“Now I’m too excited to eat,” said Frank.

“Is it the thighs?”

“Not really. It’s more like seeing things as they are. Kind of like the old acid days.”

“Well, it gets you rolling in the morning.” She stood up abruptly with her purse under her elbow. “Call me,” she said, and went out.

Frank felt a little gust and thought, I will. He paid for breakfast and went outside where a parking lot full of cars rested, seemed to await their mission. Wonderful when day had not begun, when only the breakfast waitresses and airline crews were conspicuously there and ready for the rest of the world if it ever woke up. Frank looked off to the silhouettes of the city and the mountains beyond. Odd hours always took him back to the days of weirdness, to the exhilaration of being out of step. He went on contemplating the way the world was reabsorbing him and his friends, terrified people coming to resemble their parents, their dogs, their country, their seatmates, after a pretty good spell of resembling only themselves. This, thought Frank, lacks tragic dimension almost as certainly as podiatry does. But it holds me in a certain ache to imagine I’m actually as much a businessman as my father.

But Frank was apprehensive about going to work. He was, after all, across the hall from Lucy. That hadn’t changed. And he was disquieted about seeing her this morning. Despite twenty years of trying to reduce sex to the same status as the handshake, its reduction was unreliable and it frequently had an unwelcome larger significance. Lovemaking still seemed to test the emotional assumptions that led up to it, and in Frank’s case he somehow found out that he was never going to be in love with Lucy. It was important to act on this perception before her nose seemed to grow or her mouth to hang open vacantly, her vocabulary to shrink or her feet to slap awkwardly on the linoleum. He was going to have to drum up some drippy conversation about friendship, a deadening policy statement that would reduce everything to awkwardness.

He needn’t have worried. She was in the hallway when he arrived. She wrinkled her face at the sight of him, shook her head and disappeared into her office. He went into his own without greeting Eileen, his secretary. He tore down the Eskimo poster with disgust and, briefly, hated himself. A new set of tickets and itinerary lay on his desk. He opened the itinerary. It said, “Hell.” Nothing else.

He picked up his phone.

“Eileen.”

“Yes, Mr. Copenhaver.”

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“My mind was elsewhere.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you. Now, can you get me Lucy across the hall.”

The phone rang only once.

“Lucy, Frank.”

“Yes.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“Is there something wrong …” she said. He knew now, of course, that there was.

“I thought we’d had a nice evening.”

“We had, to a point.”

“And at what point did you think it went downhill?”

“At the point you called me Gracie.”

“I did that, did I?”

“About seven times.”

“Sorry.”

“I suppose it’s not your fault, Frank. But I’m not your old wife.”

“Of course not.”

He hung the phone up and leaned on his hands. He could have said, “No, you’re not my old wife. You’re my wife’s old friend. Some friend!”

For some reason, he called June up at the dealership. They had to page her on the lot. By the time she came to the phone, he had forgotten why it had seemed so necessary to call her. Nevertheless, he told her what had happened. She listened quietly. He explained as discreetly as he could that he had said one or two inappropriate things during a spell of delightful lovemaking and it had ruined everything. June said, “I can’t get into it. When they’re doing their job, they can call me John Brown for all I care.” Frank thanked her anyway and hung up, then thanked her to himself for this burst of redneck health.

He went down to Lucy’s office and sat under the waterfall while Lucy watched him and waited for him to say something.

“Are you still angry?” he said finally.

“No. I never was angry.”

“I don’t want to lay this on you, but if you weren’t angry, you were hurt.”

“Then I was angry, but I’m not angry now.”

Some hours ago, he thought, she was chewing sheets and going “Oof, oof, oof!” while, evidently, I was going, “Oh, Gracie, oh, Gracie!” Quite a picture. Oh, dear.

Then she smiled and said, “This time, I’m not sending you anywhere.” The air had apparently cleared. Frank left her office, thinking, What a nice person.

Frank straightened up his desk and went back out through the reception area. “I’m going to the ranch,” he said.

“Can you be reached there?” asked Eileen.

“No, but I’ll be back.”

Frank drove north out of town, cutting through the subdivisions that lay around the old town center. Frank had a reluctant affection for these suburbs, with their repetitious shapes and lawns and basketball hoops and garages. He appreciated their regularity.

The road wound up through dryland farms of oats and malting barley, golden blankets in the middle of sagebrush country, toward the tall brown of snowy mountains. The city had almost disappeared behind him, yet from the front gate of the home place he could still make it out. A bright serration against the hills.

Frank stopped right in front of the house where his family once lived, a substantial farmhouse with a low, deep porch across the entire front, white with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof. The house sat on a fieldstone cellar with deep-set airyway windows at regular intervals beneath the porch. The house was locked up. In front, the tall hollyhocks his grandmother had taken such care of stood up boldly through the quack grass and competed along the border of the porch with the ocher shafts of henbane. The junipers hadn’t been trimmed and streaks of brown penetrated their dark green masses. It was a fine old house that gave Frank the creeps.

He drove slowly past it toward the barn and outbuildings, looking for Boyd Jarrell, his hired man. He had already seen Jarrell’s truck from the house, and when he crossed the cattle guard into the equipment compound, he watched Jarrell walk past the granary without looking up at Frank’s car. He saw that Jarrell would be in a foul mood, and felt a slight sinking in his stomach. Boyd liked Mike but didn’t like Frank. Mike came out here and played rancher with Boyd, building fence on the weekends or irrigating, and in general dignifying Boyd’s job by doing an incompetent imitation of it. Frank could never understand why this would ingratiate Mike to Boyd, but he guessed it was a form of tribute.

Frank parked the car and walked toward the granary. Jarrell now crossed the compound going the other way, carrying an irrigating shovel and a length of tow chain over his shoulder.

“Boyd,” Frank called, and Jarrell stopped, paused and looked over at Frank. “Have you got a minute?”

“I might.”

Frank walked over to him.

“I spoke to Lowry Equipment on Friday,” said Frank, “and the loader’s fixed on the tractor. So, that’s ready to go whenever you need it.”

“If that’s all it was.”

“That’s right. But I assume it’s okay.”

Jarrell looked away and smiled. Frank let it fall silent for a minute.

“I’ve got a buyer to look at our calves on Monday.”

“I hope he can find them.”

Frank looked at Jarrell. Jarrell had him by fifty pounds and ten years. But he had put down his mark.

“He’ll find them,” Frank said. “You’ll take him to them. Or you’ll get out.”

Frank turned to go to his car.

“Fuck you, Copenhaver,” he heard Jarrrell say, like a concussion or a huge sneeze, and Frank kept walking. He heard Jarrell walk up behind him, and in a moment Frank’s hat was slapped off his head. He bent to pick it up, then kept going to his car. Jarrell laughed and went to his truck, parked alongside the barn.

Frank stopped, then turned. He went back to where Jarrell stood. “Why did you do that, Boyd?”

“Because I don’t like people telling me what to do.”

“Well, Boyd, you should have thought of that.”

“Thought of that when, you goddamn sonofabitch? When I let you tell me what to do?”

“When you came to work for us, Boyd. You knew what the deal was. I told you what the deal was. And I might have been the guy to give you your last chance.” Jarrell crossed his arms and smiled at a faraway place. “I wouldn’t hesitate to fire you right now except for the thought you might go back and beat up your wife like you did last time.” Jarrell swung his gaze from the cloudy faraway and stared hard and flat into Frank’s face. If it happens it happens, Frank thought. I couldn’t live with myself if I shut up now. “Don’t look at me, it was in the papers. And you know what? I had the same thought everybody else did: what kind of guy puts a hundred-ten-pound woman in the Deaconess Hospital? What kind of man is that? Good luck on your next job, Boyd.”

Frank turned and began to walk toward his car. He hadn’t gone many steps before he heard Jarrell behind him again. He kept walking and the steps ceased. He got in his car and drove out of the drive, past the unlucky house, and tried to picture the exact spot where Jarrell stood when he left.

When he got back to the office, he called Mrs. Jarrell and explained that he had had to let Boyd go, that Boyd was a fine man and a fine worker but that the time had come for each of them to get on with their lives in a different way. He had had to tell people before that it was time to get on with their lives. He said this in a conciliatory voice that sounded, after a bit, like that of a radio announcer or an advertisement for a commercial halfway house for disturbed youths. Mrs. Jarrell at least let him finish, then called him every foul name he had ever heard, including a few he was unsure of, like “spastic morphodite.” Frank squinted in pain through this barrage and said that, nevertheless, he wished them all the luck in the world. His voice was a croak.

“Eat shit,” said Mrs. Jarrell. “I hope you have a stroke.”

Pause for thought. Some direct suggestions from Mrs. Jarrell. The same day Hell was suggested as a travel destination — and by a lover of the previous night! He went to see his brother Mike.

Mike was an orthodontist, and Frank had to wait until almost noon in his office, with bucktoothed preteens, reading kids’ magazines before Mike had him in. They sat in the dental lab and talked, fat Mike still in his pale green smock, his round red face revealing the constant optimism that came of doing some one small thing in the world, namely pushing young teeth back and keeping them there. Frank looked around at the instruments, at the remarkable order.

“Mike,” said Frank, “the ranch is making me crazy.”

“You always tell me this when irrigation starts.”

“I fired that cocksucker Jarrell.”

“I wish you hadn’t done that. He’s a hard worker.”

“I went out there today and he was in one of his cowboy snits.”

“You shouldn’t have gone out there. You know this happens when irrigation water runs. Everybody becomes an animal.”

“I have to go out there. I had the tractor fixed for the filthy shit. He busted it, bent the bucket and blew the hydraulics. But he can’t talk to anyone so I got it fixed. I tell him this and it just seems to make him madder. I told him we had to have the buyer look at the calves. This makes him mad. He knocks my hat off, salutes me with a ‘fuck you.’ It’s unbearable, the cowboy mentality. I don’t want to hire any more cowboys. They’re all like Jarrell — drunken, wife-beating, snoose-chewing geeks with big belt buckles and catfish mustaches. They spend all their time reading magazines about themselves. College professors drive out and tell them they’re a dying breed. I hate them. I tried to make things right with his wife so he doesn’t put her in Deaconess again. What’d ya think she said to me?”

“Another ‘fuck you’?”

“No, you’re close. She said, ‘Eat shit.’ And she called me a ‘spastic morphodite.’ Ever hear that one before?”

“I have to admit, that’s a new one on me.”

“This would be a half-man, half-woman and very uncoordinated.”

“Huh, real circus stuff.”

“Yeah. And I don’t want anymore. I’m a businessman, an ordinary businessman, and I want to keep it that way.”

“Why don’t you sell it? I really don’t care, Frank. Marny would like a place we could take the kids picnicking when they get older, but there’ll always be somewhere we can go.”

“I’m going to get it out of my life whether we sell it or not. I would sell it, but I’m a sentimental asshole and it’s ruining my life. I can’t put anything behind me. I’m an asshole. I’m an asshole.”

“I agree with your evaluation,” Mike said.

“We never lived there, for God sakes.”

“Yeah, but Dad grew up there.”

“He hated it, Mom hated it.”

“It doesn’t matter. That was long ago. Now it’s the ‘old home place,’ Frank. I don’t know why you keep applying these truth tests. It doesn’t matter what really happened. It only matters what people think is true, and Mom and Dad thought they spent the happiest years of their life there. It’s true they argued for thirty years, but I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t an old folks’ home. It had that much going for it.”

Frank didn’t want this to be the last word, but nothing came to him and he had to let it stand.