The Bushwacked Piano

11

Somewhat experimentally, Ann let her hair hang out of the second story window. Black and rather ineffective against the logs, her beautiful, oval, foxlike face nonetheless glowed against the glassy space behind her.

She retreated inside and began to clean up her room. Protractors, lenses, field guides, United States Geodetic Survey topographical maps, cores of half-eaten apples, every photograph of Dorothea Lange’s ever reproduced, tennis shorts, panties, a killing jar, a mounting board, fatuous novels, a book about theosophy, a bust of Ouspensky, a wad of cheap Piranesi prints, her diplomas and brassieres, her antique mousetraps, her dexamyl and librium tablets, her G-string, firecrackers, bocci balls and flagons, her Finnish wooden toothbrush, her Vitabath, her target pistol, parasol, moccasins, Pucci scarves, headstone rubbings, buffalo horns, elastic bandages, mushroom keys, sanitary napkins, monogram die for stationery, Elmer Fudd mask, exploding cigars, Skira art books, the stuffed burrowing owl, the stuffed, rough-legged hawk, the stuffed tanager, the stuffed penguin, the stuffed chicken, the plastic pomegranate, the plaster rattlesnake ashtray, the pictures of Payne sailing, shooting, drinking, laughing, reading comics, the pictures of George smiling gently in a barrera seat at the Valencia Plaza de Toros, an annotated Story of O, the series of telephoto shots of her mother and father duking it out beside the old barge canal in Washington, D. C., Payne’s prep school varsity jacket, an English saddle, a lid of Panama Green, Charlie Chaplin’s unsuccessful autobiography, dolls, a poster from the movie Purple Noon, a menu from the Gallatoire restaurant, one from the Columbia in Tampa, one from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami and one from Joe Muer’s in Detroit, and one rolled skin from a reticulated python curled around the base of a stainless steel orbiting lamp from Sweden — in short, a lot of stuff lay wall to wall in a vast mess, upon which she threw herself with energy born of her separation from Nicholas Payne.

Within all of her reflections pertaining to him, some in her fantastic style, some in her rational, there permeated the mood of impossibility. Rationally, she knew her training barred a love affair in extenso with a man who could describe himself as a cad, someone who had little enough esteem for the structure of her background, anthropologically speaking, to call her father “a jerk-off.” But in the back of her mind, a tiny voice told her that Payne was someone whose impossibilities could be adapted to expand her spiritual resources. Nothing happened she couldn’t outgrow; but what bothered a little — sometimes — was that Nicholas, through some total romantic frangibility, didn’t have quite the same resilience. His emotional losses had a way of turning out to be real ones. It was like in books and made her jealous.

Here, in a funny way, a considerable moral precision was seen in Ann; and it was a faculty that refracted from quite another part of her than that which had her hang her head from the window, hair against logs. And stranger still, it was this part, not the Rapunzel, which made her once so limp with love for Payne, the cad, Pecos Bill; that put her under such a spell that to see him at all would be to cut her moorings forever on a risk no one was recommending.

She read somewhere that love was an exaggeration that only led to others; and she seized on the notion. She wanted a subtler scale of emotions than it offered. She was exhausted by the bruising alternation from ecstasy to despair. For someone who believed she might have been an honest-to-God intellectual, it was humiliating. During that first winter, she and Nicholas would walk on the Lake Erie shore making plenty sure that the desolating wave wrack of human debris didn’t touch their feet; involved either in total spiritual merger or agonizing disharmony; remembering it now, she could only think of the lurid, metallic sunsets, the arcs of freighter smoke and the brown tired line of Canada beyond.

And, too, these alternations had a certain cosmic niftiness, a Heathcliff and Cathy finality that gave her a sense of their importance. And the secrecy was good. No one knew they were down in his boat copulating in the rope bunk, night after night. No one knew they launched citizens of their own to the condom-city that had been triangulated between Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit. No one knew that they had chipped in and sent the Mother Superior at Payne’s grade school a tantalizing nightie from Frederick’s of Hollywood with the note, “To a real Mother Superior!” No one knew, despite Payne’s opposition to Lozenge, that she felt transcendentally affixed to every day that passed for an entire winter.

Now, from a handy tree in central Montana, Wayne Codd watched Ann fall upon her bed in the debris-filled room to weep wretchedly, spasmodically. What a sight! He put the binoculars down from his eyes, having banished a rather piddling inclination to self-abuse. The hell with it. They was work to do. He felt the imperial blue of the West form in his eyes. He felt the virile prominence of the cowboy in the mythographical ecosystem of America. Like a sleek and muscular hyena, he knew the expendability of chumps and those who weep, that the predators, the eagles of humanity, might soar. He shinnied down ready for ranching. He hadn’t cried since he was a child.

For Missus Fitzgerald, the handwriting on the wall was about to appear as a lurching mechanical hysteria which took — in this incarnation — the form of a Hudson Hornet.

For Payne, driving along and listening to the livestock reports—“These fat steers is dollaring up awful good”—it was not as easy as it looked; a vast fungo-bat of reality seemed to await him in the Shields Valley; to be precise, in the vicinity of the Double Tepee or Squaw Tits Ranch. But it would do to say in his favor that the old fidgeting approach, the old obliquity, was gone. No, frightened as he might be, he would arrive head-on.

Little comfort derived from the slumbrous heat of the day. It was a flyblown hot summer to begin with; but this bluebottle extravaganza of shimmering terrain didn’t seem like anything you would call Montana. The animals were running crazy and dead game was all over the highway. The creeks were trickles. Their trout hid in springs and cutbanks. A long mountain bluff ended on the side of the road, the merest tongue tip of a yawning universe.

As he drove, he had a bird’s-eye view of his own terror. High, high above the mountain West, Payne saw an automobilicule, microscopic, green, creeping up a hairline valley between wen-size mountains. The driver was too small to be seen. The horizon was curved like a boomerang. Payne “chuckled goodnaturedly” at the tiny driver you couldn’t even see who thought his fear saturated everything down to the Pre-Cambrian core. How naughty!

God the Father was out here somewhere; as to the Holy Spirit, he merely whirled quietly in a culvert, unseen by anyone.

Payne turned the radio dial irritably, getting only British rock music. It maddened him. What a smutty little country England had become, exporting all its Cro-Magnon song dodos, its mimsy, velveteen artistes. Payne wanted Richie Valens or Carl Perkins, and now.

Missus Fitzgerald, trying to make up for snippish words and a recent attack involving ballpoint pens, made with her own red hands a rich cassolette of duck and pork and lamb and beans. With her great Parisian balloon whisk she beat a pudding in an enormous tin-lined copper bowl; and set it — trembling — on the drainboard.

Payne lifted the front gate and swung it aside, stepping carefully across the cattle guard. His hands were trembling. He drove the car through, got out and closed the gate behind himself.

Along the road to the ranch buildings, a small fast stream ran, much diminished, and where it made turns were broad washes of gravel from the spring run-off. Scrub willow grew here, and on the cliffbanks were the holes of swallows. Then came the mixed woodland that Payne could not have known was the last stretch of geography between himself and the house. That it was composed of larch, native grass and bull pine held no interest for him. He had to go to the bathroom quite a lot. A relatively small band of pure American space seemed to throw a step-over-toe-hold on his gizzard.

Payne made no attempt to lighten his tread on the porch and, before thought, gave the door a good pounding. Mister and Missus Fitzgerald opened the door together stretching their arms to him, paternally and maternally. In the long warmly lit corridor Ann stood shyly murmuring “darling.” They took him inside, warming him with their bodies; everyone, it seemed, tried to hold his hand. “May we call you son?” Ann cried with happiness. They leaped to each other, kissed with youthful passion, held each other at arm’s length. “At last!” A beaming, lusty preacher moved forward as though on a trolley, supporting a Bible with one hand and resting the other on top of it.

Payne made no attempt to lighten his tread on the porch and, before thought, gave the door a good pounding. He heard someone move and was afraid. Frequent nerve farts troubled the silence. He thought: Windex, buffalo, Zaragoza. He knocked once more and the door behind the little grate opened at eye level. Nary a sound was heard. He knocked again, stood quietly and knocked once more. A weary voice, that of Mister Fitzgerald, was heard from the grill. “I hear you, I hear you. I’m just trying to think what to do about you.”

“Let me in.”

The door opened suddenly. “Right you are,” said Fitzgerald. “God help us.” He shut the door. “Follow me.” Fitzgerald pulled him into the hallway. Payne followed him down to a small utility room. “Stay here.” Fitzgerald left.

Payne stood very nearly without motion for ten or fifteen minutes. Nothing. The washing machine stopped and a few minutes later the dryer, which also had been running, whirled to a stop. Payne idly opened the washing machine and saw the still wet clothes pressed centrifugally to the walls of its tumbler. The door opened behind him.

Missus Fitzgerald’s voice came from behind him. “Who are you?”

Payne turned, stood, smiled. Her face was more delicate than a casserole.

“GET OUT”

When sophisticated or wealthy women get angry, they attempt to make their faces look like skulls. Missus Fitzgerald did this and looked awfully like a jack-o-lantern. She was that fat.

Payne offered to explain.

“GET OUT!” She just said that. “HE’S IN OUR HOUSE!” she added, taking credit for a discovery that was not hers.

“I can—”

“NO!”

“I can—”

“NO!”

“No, what?”

“YOU CAN’T … YOU HAVE TO GET OUT!”

Somewhere along in here she began scoring heavily with a plumber’s friend with which she belabored Payne. He shielded himself and sought protection behind the hampers. “You’ve got crime written all over you,” she panted. He seized the plumber’s friend, suppressed an itch to beat the living piss out of her with it. Fitzgerald arrived, having allowed a leisurely ripening of the scene.

“You jerk,” said Fitzgerald, “you didn’t know when a favor had been done for you.” He chuckled grimly to himself. “Do you realize,” he asked, “that when the Second World War was raging and Hitler was riding high that I was the squash champion of the Detroit Athletic Club?” This stopped everything.”

“What has that got to do with anything!” his wife, Edna, wailed. Fitzgerald started into a long song and dance about the kind of guy he was. And though there was considerable poignancy in his latest fatuity, its effect was to shatter Missus Fitzgerald’s primitive stagecraft of shrieks and accusations.

“Ann!” Payne bellowed after some thought, trying to bring things to life. He caught the right note; because Fitzgerald lunged to shut him up. But Payne could not mistake the sound of her skittering descent of the stairs, one hand on the rail, the which seemed to last an eternity.

As she appeared, he commenced cowering before her parents. They melted under her glare. Payne saw her, his spirit twining and tautening. Before him, the one true. They smiled amid the total inutility of this bug scuffle. Discreetly, Ann recorded everything with her camera, including a final blow with the plunger.

“Neutral corners,” cried Fitzgerald.

“Are we not ever to be safe?” inquired his wife. Payne quietly turned the washing machine on again.

“I can explain everything,” he said with sudden blind joy.

“We don’t want to hear!”

“Maybe you should,” Ann said, her voice a saffron buffalo trotting to Jerusalem with a pony express mailbag of loving hellos. “Maybe you ought to.”

“Are we not ever to be safe from the depredations of this criminal?”

“Edna,” said Fitzgerald in the plainsong of common sense.

“Never?” A minute fissure had appeared in her voice.

“Edna,” Payne said.

“I want someone to tell me,” she said with a noble, judicial mien — as though her voice was making an independent threat to cry—“I’m prepared to make other arrangements with my own life if we are to be repeatedly and casually displaced by the depredations of this hoodlum … Catholic criminal type.”

“Oh, now Edna.”

“I’m a backslider,” said Payne. “There’s many an empty day between me and my last novena.”

“I have my wig bank, as silly as that may sound. But there is work for me.”

“No, no, no. Payne will be gone. You’ll see.”

A flash of hatred as can only be produced by an inconvenienced businessman arced from Fitzgerald’s eyes to those of Payne. Payne wanted so much to have a showdown; but he knew it would come to nothing with Ann. It was part of her style to present herself as an integral part of a noble family package.

On the other hand, when her father took Payne by the throat and attempted to strangle him, it was Ann who tore free his hands.

This was another mistake for Fitzgerald; its unseemliness even drove his wife from the room. She went out saying she no longer saw how it would be possible to inhabit this ranch.

“This hasn’t been a satisfactory show,” tried Fitzgerald, winningly, “on the part of the Missus and myself.”

“Frankly, the part with the toilet plunger left me cold.” It had become difficult to be heard over the washing machine. It shuddered and wobbled in a steam-laden surge. Engine-driven, Payne imagined, it whirled a sacred cargo of Ann’s little things.

“Daddy,” Ann said, “it’s too late for this kind of … protection.”

“It’s hard to face that, honey.”

“But you must.”

“I know that darling. I see that too. We never interfered much before, did we? Before Payne broke into the house? Did we darling? And bombarded Mom with filth when she found him in the library? Did we? But, kids, try and see it my way, huh? Nick here screaming that Mom’s head wouldn’t draw flies at a raree show — that’s not good, is it kids? Or is this a generation deal?”

“Can we leave the laundry room?” Payne enquired.

“Let me just say this,” Duke Fitzgerald went on. “Ann, do as you wish. We’ll honor whatever you decide. And Mom will back me up. I promise.”

“I don’t know what I wish!”

“Ann—”

“I don’t know, Daddy!” Ann didn’t want to pair off. She wanted to play in her room with all the junk for a few more years. Fitzgerald, the ghoul, saw it.

“I mean, look, do you want to get married?”

“No one said that,” Ann said. Payne was grievously pained. Fitzgerald raised his palms up, both of them to one side of his face in a gesture of assured noninterference.

“You wanna set up house, I’ll get outa the way.” Fitzgerald could have had the ball game then and there; but a sudden vision of a house without Ann in it, and of his wife charging in with a fistful of ballpoint pens, made him pull back. He lacked — at that moment anyway — an essential killer’s instinct.

But Fitzgerald had shown his right, even in this incomplete thrust, to a room at the top. Now he wanted to round things out. “Nick, there’s room here for you. Ann’ll tell you when we eat.” Even that took some restraint. Fitzgerald wanted to promise Payne that if he turned his back it was going to be angel choirs long before he thought he’d ever see them.

“Fine,” Payne said, nodding graciously.

“Okay, kid. We’ve got a deal.”

Fitzgerald went to the door and took its handle. He let his head drop a little without turning to look at them. “G’night, Annie,” he said thickly and went out.

When he had gone, Ann said, “He never called me Annie before.”

Payne seized her. They grappled lovingly among the hampers. A famous man says that we go through life with “a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms”; and these, these, these children, these these these these little children will soon not be able to feel this way about anything again.