The Bushwacked Piano

4

People turn up.

For much too long, he continued to appear dazed. He often thought, “I couldn’t have been more of a pig.” Interested only in things that provided no morning after, he paid out deceptive conversations that made everyone in earshot fidget.

When he closed his eyes, Ann seemed to speed through a cobalt sky, a lovely decal on the rigid Ptolemaic dome. Every room gave at the corners. And why should anyone in the fat of late spring imagine that winter was not far away, scratching its balls in some gloomy thicket?

He dreamed and dreamed of his adolescence when he had spent his free time watching medical movies, carrying a revolver, and going around, for no reason, on crutches.

He was interested these days in how people listened.

He heard them. Completely buggy in the frame bed, he pawed the wall for the switch. They were down there: dogs. He climbed out of bed, driving a putty-colored shadow to the stairhead. At the bottom, a sea of fur flowed toward the toilet. He heard them taking turns drinking. He was excited and frightened. He felt a long, terrible oblong of space standing out from his chest and going all the way to the first floor.

The next day, he went to see a World Adventure Series movie of Arabia and talked for hours about Death In Africa. Two thousand years of desert heat turns a man’s body into a weightless puffball which can be made into a useful kayak by slitting the paunch. Take it fishing. Show your friends.

He called Ann at the ranch. “Have you been arrested?” she inquired.

“Not yet.”

“Oh, well. I didn’t know what they were going to do.”

“I’ll never forget it, Ann.”

“I wouldn’t think so, no.”

“I couldn’t have been more of a pig.”

“… well …” she said equivocally.

“Things good there on the ranch?”

“There’s this new foreman,” Ann answered, “he’s sort of beautiful and mean.”

“I can handle myself,” Payne said.

“You apparently thought so,” Ann commented, “when you perched on the mantel that night—”

“On the shelf actually.”

“—and screamed like a crow — like a crow — at mother. That’s something, all in all, for a prize.”

“I got one,” Payne said mysteriously.

“Nicholas, oh …”

“You’re crying.”

“This call … is getting expensive.”

“You are crying aren’t you?”

“… I …”

“I see you,” Payne began clearly, “almost as a goddess, your hair streaming against the Northern Lights. And you tell me that this call is getting expensive. When there’s a picture of you in my head which is an absolute classic. On the order of something A-1.” In front of Payne’s chin three holes: 5¢, 10¢, 25¢; a tiny plunger dreams of a plungette; glass on all four sides, circles of hair oil printed with a million hairlines and underneath, a tan-colored tray, scratched with names, a chain and a directory.

“Nicholas,” Ann said, “try to train yourself to have a healthy mind.”

“To what end?”

“Happiness and art.”

“Oh my God.” He concluded swiftly and hung up.

Hit the door and it folds. Fumes and automobiles. I’ve landed in a part of the American corpus that smells bad. The body politic has ringworm. These women. Really. All of them perfect double-headers. Smile at both ends. Janus. Make their own gravy like dogfood. I’ve been up against all kinds. Some of them lift an arm and there is the sharpishness of a decent European cheddar. And that art talk. I know what it leads to: more of her excesses in its name. And things like relinquishing underwear to protest the bugging of her phone by the CIA.

Appropriately, a hand-painted sign adorns an opposing brick wall: a weary Uncle Sam in red, white and blue stretches abject, imploring hands to the beholder; a receding chin has dropped to reveal the mean declivity of his mouth, which says “I NEED A PICK ME UP.” Payne approached, saw with shock the signature: C. J. Clovis Signs. Back in the booth, he splashed through the Yellow Pages and found his name.

Fascinated, Payne started, seeing another, up the alley which ended a quarter mile ahead with a blue gorgeous propane tank; the other end, a little white gap of dirty sky like the space between the end of a box-wrench held, for no reason at all, to the eye, a little space and, in the center, a red quaint telephone booth, where he had spoken. A radio played, its fell music contested by a rabid squabble of “electrical interference.” Here was no scene for a happy boy. This was a land of rat wars, a dark fiefdom of bacteria, lance corporals with six arachnid legs.

The far wall, over the propane tank, between drain pipes spangled with oxidation, another sign, this depicting a dark Andalusian beauty, possibly a bit literal. Behind her the municipal skyline arises, tendrils and building pieces, in a total nastiness of habitat; the barest tips of her fingers, palpitant and patrician, rise barely over the lower frame; cheap day-glo letters proclaim her message: “My hosbin’s frans dawn lok me percause I yam an Eespanidge voomans.” The signature — ye gods!—C. J. Clovis. Beneath it, his marque, a naugahyde fleur-de-lys.

If Ann were here she would look at him, eyes reeling with meaning. She would never have seen the humor of the sign on the next building which showed five crudely drawn French poodles spelling out PILGRIM COUNTRY over a New England landscape in technicolor dogspew. How would she take the last picture Payne could find which showed a “farmer” attacking a “housewife” whom he has caught stealing, by moonlight, in his vegetable garden? Underneath, “Here’s a cucumber you won’t forget!”

Payne, agog, sped, by foot, away from the area; and ended sitting on a curb. The question was whether he had seen that stuff at all. That was the question, actually.

Cautiously, he returned to the telephone booth and called Clovis’ number and listened in silence to a recorded message: “Hello, ah, hello, ah, hellowah thur, zat you, Bob, Marty, Jan, Edna, Dexter, Desmond, Desilu, Dee-Dee, Daryl, dogfight, fistfood …”

Payne was slipping.

To his credit, he asked himself, “Did I hear that?”

The sun fell far astern of the alleyway.

A tired rat picked its way among the remains of an innerspring mattress, determined to find The Way.

A dark brown elevator cable suspending a conventload of aging nuns in front of the fortieth-floor office of a Knights of Columbus dentist, popped one more microscopic strand in a thousand-foot shaft of blue dust light.

Certain soldiers took up their positions.

An engineer in Menlo Park pondered possible mailboxes of the future.

In the half-light of an office, a clerk had a typist; the landlord, spying from a maintenance closet, made his eyes ache in the not good light and thought he saw two Brillo pads fighting for a frankfurter.

“I don’t claim to be a saint,” Payne remarked.

One leg had gone lame, his pocket itched for his old heater, his old Hartford Equalizer.

Millions of sonorous, invisible piano wires caused the country to swing in stately, dolorous circles around the telephone booth. Payne felt it hum through the worn black handle of the folding door. The directory, with its thousandfold exponential referents, tapped with the secret life of the nation.

He went off now, thinking of Ann: impossible not to imagine himself and Ann in some cosmic twinning; they float on fleecy cumulo-nimbus, a montage of saints says: It is meet.

And, picturing himself against the high interiors of the Mountain West, he thought of old motorcycle excursions. He looked at the Hudson Hornet and asked, will it do?