The Bushwacked Piano (13 page)

After a while, Payne admitted he just didn’t know what to say.

“Almost the worst part,” Clovis said, “is that I just got a contract for a Batrium.”

Payne remembered the breakwater at home.

“I’ll do it. I’ll build the … batrium.”

“You don’t know how,” Clovis said, his face, unbelievably enough, lighting with ambition and greed.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“I’m so happy. I may as well say it. I am.”

Payne sped away with a sense he hadn’t had since his paper route. The feeling of the last few days of no longer needing sleep was exaggerated at once.

So, for the next two days, Payne lay upon his back in the
top of that silo, in the infraheat of the pure high exposure enhanced by the warmth of fermentation below him. And he carefully nailed, coigned, wedged, butt-blocked, strong-backed, mitered and chamfered the passages of the Clovis Batrium, the sweat pouring out of him in a fog. Even pinch-face, the farmer, admitted that it was “crackerjack carpentry”; and there was no trouble collecting the payment in full which Payne delivered to a rather pleased multiple amputee in the Livingston clinic.

Ann’s voice from the stairwell, sandy and musical at once, “Nicholas! Supper!”

“Sit wherever you like,” said Missus Fitzgerald with cloying joy at Payne’s arrival. “Wherever.” Payne placed himself next to Ann. It was quite dark already; though a candelabrum of beeswax candles burned an octopus of light in the gloom. As everyone else arranged themselves, Fitzgerald at the serving dishes, Payne believed he saw, in the far end window, the face of Codd rise, gape and vanish.

“Montana,” Missus Fitzgerald said in a heavy twang for the occasion, “is a fur piece from home.”

“Anything here not suit you, Mister Payne?” said Fitzgerald.

“Nothing.”

“Do you like to travel?” La Fitzgerald.

“I do very much, thank you.”

“And where have you been?”

Payne named the places.

La said she had been to all those and more.

“Mother,” said Fitzgerald, “is a travel fiend.”

“A travel what?”

“Fiend.”

“I began,” Missus Fitzgerald agreed, “as a young girl, traveling in Italy. The Italians in those days pinched the prettiest girls—”

“Mussolini cleaned that particular clock,” said her husband.

“And I,” Missus Fitzgerald said, “had to leave the country.”

“I see,” said Payne, nervous.

“A mass of tiny bruises.”

“I uh see.”

“Italy, this was Italy.”

Payne had to comment.

“It must have been a long time ago, Missus Fitzgerald,” he groped. The indelicacy of the remark was invisible to him, glaring to the others. Now, once again, Missus Fitzgerald hated his crime-ridden little guts.

“Mother, Nicholas didn’t mean
that
.”

“No,” said the Mum, “you wouldn’t suppose ordinarily.”

Payne began to see it and, wordlessly, felt plumb stupid. He was quite unnerved by the situation. The last time they’d had him in the house … oh, well, what was the use. It was on everybody’s mind. King Kong takes a nosedive. A proclamation of emperor. Magister lewdy at the papal bullfights. Stalked through the house, a shotgun to the lip, a brandy for each ear. Mortal coils was the color of his vita. It was as simple as that.

Payne looked at Ann, saddened that he was not always a man who was in his own driver’s seat. By flashes, she was enraged too that he lacked George’s polish. And Payne wondered: Will you care for me when I’m old? Will you fork over for two adults in the mezzanine when we hit the Saturday matinee? Or make me sit in the smoking loggia with my cheap cigar, bicycle clips on my pants legs and a card that reads:
The U.S.A. social security props this potlicker
up every morning. It is yer duty as a citizen to treat him like a Dutch uncle
. Don’t make me get old, Mom. Remember me? The boy that wanted to skyrocket into eternity in a white linen suit that showed his deltoids? Don’t permit the years to tire him. But then. Well. Isn’t it really time that is the shit that hits everybody’s fan? Fess up, isn’t it? But Ann, to hold my hand when the others have gone and left me with words of foundationless criticism, after whole epochs, the two of us to face the final ditch spewing exalted thoughts like feathers from a slashed pillowcase. Wouldn’t that be a dream the regality of which would shut down the special-order department at Neiman-Marcus?

“There,” Payne said with clarity. “I feel so much better.” They looked at him. He was suddenly blinded with embarrassment; and his mind slipped away, really slipped away. Past the far edge of the gravy boat, he perceived an Oscar Niemeyer condominium high in the cordillera of the Andes. An elderly Brazilian diplomat stood over a young Indian prostitute, a finger raised, his nose in a manual, saying,
“Do that!”

At the same time, he saw curious things happening in the American West. For instance, at the foot of the Belt Mountains, a young man who had earlier committed the stirring murder of a visiting Kuwait oil baron, ate from a tin and barked
“mudder”
at his captors.

A tall summer thunderhead hung over the valley of the Shields River, in fact, directly over the Fitzgerald ranch, certain of the walls of whose main house hid the little dinner party from the view of nobody whatsoever.

Nobody whatsoever would have been much interested in Payne’s discomfort which was quite carefully cultivated by two of the three people around him.

“No,” Payne said, “I couldn’t eat another turnip.”

“Potatoes?”

“No,” Payne said, “(
ditto
) potato.”

“What about some asparagus?”

“No,” said Payne, “(
ditto
) any more asparagus.”

“Payne,” said Fitzgerald, “what do you want?

“How do you mean?”

“Out of life?”

“Fun.”

“Really,” said Missus Fitzgerald.

“So do you.”

“But,” she said, “I’d have hardly put it that way.”

“Nor I.” Fitzgerald, naturally.

“I would have,” said Ann, trying to show her surprise at their remarks. The word “fun” seemed to accrete images of liberation.

“You would have put it,” Payne said in a general address to his elders, “more impressively. But you would have meant fun.”

“No,” said La, “we would have meant something more impressive than fun too.”

“You seem to imagine that by fun I mean some darkish netherworld of hanky-panky. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Fitzgerald shook his head in a wintry smile. The effect, entirely unsubstantiated, was of wisdom.

“What do
you
mean by fun?” Missus Fitzgerald inquired.

“I mean happiness. Read Samuel Butler.”

“I assure you we have.”

“Do it again.”

“Oh, Payne, now,” smiled Fitzgerald, his face a study in major Greek pity. “Payne, Payne, Payne.”

Payne felt, thinking of his father’s furnace, that he wanted to heat the air to incandescence for six cubic acres
around the house. “Cut that shit out now,” he told Fitzgerald.

Ann, sensing the feasibility of Nicholas’ blowing his stack, raised the tips of conciliatory fingers over the table’s edge as in steady there, steady now big feller, don’t kick over your oats there now big feller there now you.

“I wanted,” Payne said, “merely to have dinner in an agreeable atmosphere. Is generosity no longer available?”

“Ah Payne, Payne, Payne.”

“Give it to me straight. I can take it.”

The mother told Payne that they had had enough of him. “We merely asked what you believed in,” she said. “We had no idea it would precipitate nastiness.”

“What I believe in?
I believe in happiness, birth control, generosity, fast cars, environmental sanity, Coor’s beer, Merle Haggard, upland game birds, expensive optics, helmets for prizefighters, canoes, skiffs and sloops, horses that will not allow themselves to be ridden, speeches made under duress; I believe in metal fatigue and the immortality of the bristlecone pine. I believe in the Virgin Mary and others of that ilk. Even her son whom civilization accuses of sleeping at the switch.” Missus Fitzgerald was seen to leave the room, Ann to gaze into her lap. “I believe that I am a molecular swerve not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap-minded. I believe in the ultimate rule of men who are sleeping. I believe in the cargo of torpor which is the historically registered bequest of politics. I believe in Kate Smith and Hammond Home Organs. I believe in ramps and drop-offs.” Fitzgerald got out too, leaving only Payne and Ann; she, in the banishing of her agony and feeling she was possibly close to Something, raised adoring eyes to the madman. “I believe in spare tires and emergency repairs. I believe in the final possum. I believe in little eggs of light falling from outer space and
the bombardment of the poles by free electrons. I believe in tintypes, rotogravures and parked cars, all in their places. I believe in roast spring lamb with boiled potatoes. I believe in spinach with bacon and onion. I believe in canyons lost under the feet of waterskiers. I believe that we are necessary and will rise again. I believe in words on paper, pictures on rock, intergalactic hellos. I believe in fraud. I believe that in pretending to be something you aren’t you have your only crack at release from the bondage of time. I believe in my own dead more than I do in yours. What’s more,
credo in unum deum
, I believe in one God. He’s up there. He’s mine. And he’s smart as a whip.

“Anyway,” he said mellifluously and with a shabbily urbane gesture, “you get the drift. I hate to flop the old philosophy on the table like so much pig’s guts. And I left out a lot. But, well, there she is.”

And it was too. Now and again, you have to check the bread in the oven.

An instant later, he imagined he was singing the Volga boat song. Ann clapped a hand over his mouth. It wasn’t the Volga boat song. It was some febrile, mattoid, baying nonsense. No one saw why he should be acting up like this.

“What are you
doing?
” It reminded her of the way people went crazy on TV as opposed to Dostoyevsky.

“Dunno.”

He had strained himself.

His feeling was that it was the dining room, the act of eating itself, that dramatized what the Mum, the Dad, had in mind for him. That was what was behind their fierceness over their food; they were pretending it was him, he decided; and he didn’t like it from an almost metaphysical plane of objection; to the effect that martyrdom should be represented more strikingly than in platters of meat and
vegetables. These things, thought Payne, are not relics. Bits of the true sirloin. He imagined monstrances filled with yams and okra; our beloved smörgasbord has gone on before.

Payne calmed down. He considered the solemn flummery of the Fitzgeralds’ departure, the effect that time was not to be wasted on him. He looked at Ann, becomingly leaning on the table with both elbows. A certain hirsute mollusc came to mind.

“Dinner seemed to fall short of one of those civilized encounters of mind we hear about.”

“Yes,” Ann said, ungratefully adding, “your fault as much as theirs. It just seems completely uncultivated.”

“I think so.”

“That kind of silliness could be endless. You’ll never tire each other out.”

“My silliness means more.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I’ve made it a way of life,” Payne said. “That means something.”

“But what are we going to do. I’m so tired of this, this—”

“Yes, me too.”

“This, this—”

“Yes,” Payne said.

“We could run off,” she said, thinking that she could take pictures, making the act of running away itself the unifying factor or theme.

“I see it in my mind’s eye,” Payne said wearily.

“I mean it though, Nicholas.”

“The hobo shot. The American road. We sit in ditches covered with sage and pollen. Cannonades of giant mid-American laughter flood the sky around us; it is ours. We are giants in the earth snagging Strategic Air Command
bombers in our hair because it is big hair. That goes up. Where bombers are.”

There was a disturbance at the door, a small aggressive shuffling, the lout’s movement of Codd.

“I was wondering.”

“Yes?” Payne said, the dim view showing.

“If there was anything I could do.”

“No, Wayne,” Ann said pleasantly. “Thanks, not now.”

“But Mister Fitzgerald said to come over and see what I could do.”

“Nothing, thanks, Codd,” Payne said.

“I was sure that—”

“The old dodo gave you a bum steer,” Payne said simply.

“I’ll tell him,” said Codd with the smile there.

“You tell him that you were given a bum steer by him and had received it in good condition.”

“Yes, because he said for me to come see what I could do. But I’ll tell him from you that the thing was he had given me this bum steer.”

“One other thing, Codd.”

“No, you one other thing a minute. I’m thinking of busting you in the God damn mouth.”

“No, Codd.”

“No, what.”

“You won’t do that. You’ll announce it over and over but in the end you won’t do it.”

“That’s your idea, huh.”

“Sure is.”

“Well if you get it,” Codd said, “don’t come cryin to me. Because it’ll just be a case of you achin for it and me givin it to you.”

“As a guest here I resent the abuse of footlings. Presently, I may be heard to shriek for the management.”

“Do it.”

“
Peep
. See? My heart’s not in it. Codd, one false move and I’ll pull your upper lip over the back of your head. And another thing: I love you.”

“Then you’re a fruit.”

“But Ann too, see? It’s one of those world brotherhood deals that’s liable to end in liquidation. Damn it, I’m washing my hands of you. I’d hoped you’d turn out to be something better than this. Your mother and I had dreamed you’d be the first mate on a torpedoed Nazi destroyer. And I don’t know where this leaves us; with our dreams I guess; of what you might have been; if it hadn’t been for the war years.”

“What you ought to do,” Codd said, seeming to know what he was talking about, “is go up to Warm Springs and get yourself certified. Far as I’m concerned, yer too crazy to beat up.”