The Bushwacked Piano (5 page)

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?

The Hudson Hornet appears at the mouth of a long bend, a two-lane county road in the Pryor Mountains of Montana. Bare streaks in wooded country, glacial moraine, scree slides like lapping tongues, sage in the creek bottoms, aspen and cottonwood. Behind the lurching Hornet, a homemade wagon rumbles on four six-ply recaps from the factory of Firestone and Co. The wagon is the work of the driver, Nicholas Payne. With a bowed gypsy roof, the sides are screen with hardwood uprights. Inside are bedrolls, an ammunition tin filled with paperbacks, a stack of Django Reinhardt records, a cheap Japanese tape recorder; banging from side to side in the springless wagon, a sheepherder’s stove seems to dominate everything; its pipe can be run up through an asbestos ring in the roof and an awning lowered to enclose the sides. There is a Winchester .22 for camp meat. There is a fishing rod.

Payne walked around Livingston, hands deep in pockets, head deep in thought, feet deep in the dark secrecy of boots. He went into Gogol’s Ranchwear and Saddlery to
try on footwear. He had no money but he wanted ideas. He felt if he could hit on the right boots, things would be better. His throat ached with the knowledge that it would not be impossible for him to run into Ann in this town. “Howdy!” The salesman. Payne sat.

“Boots,” he said.

“What you got in mind?”

“Not a thing other than boots.”

“Okee doke.”

“Can I charge them?”

“Live in town?”

“I sure do,” Payne said.

“Then go to her,” said the salesman. “Let’s get you started here.” He brought a pair of boots down from the display stand. He rested the heel of one in his left palm and supported its toe with the fingertips of his right hand. “Here’s a number that sells real well here in Big Sky Country. It’s all-American made from veal leather with that ole Buffalo Bill high stovepipe top. I can give you this boot in buff-ruff, natural kangaroo or antique gold—”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“It is not right that a cowboy should dress up like a fruit.”

“Now you listen to me. I just sold a pair of boots to a working cowboy in pink turtleskin and contrasting water buffalo wingtips.”

“You don’t have to get mad.”

“I sold a pair of dual re-tan latigo leather Javelinas with peach vamps to a real man. And you tell me fruit.”

“No one said you had to be a meanie about it.”

“Okay, we drop it.” The clerk insisted that they shake hands. “Let’s get you into a pair.”

“Now I want tennis shoes in mocha java.”

“I thought you wanted boots.”

“If I go barefoot will you tint my pinkies Antique Parmesan?”

“Sir.”

“Yes?”

“Gogol’s Ranchwear and Saddlery doesn’t want your business.”

Payne went to the front of the store, stepped up to the X-ray machine, flipped it on and put his eyes to the viewer. There was a handle at its side that controlled the pointer which Payne directed at the memento mori of his skeletal feet on a billiard-cloth green background. He suddenly saw how he would not live forever; and he wished to adjust his life before he died.

Payne took to his room and napped unhappily until evening. He woke up thinking of how he had camped one night on the Continental Divide and pissed with care into the Atlantic watershed. Now he wasn’t sure he should have. He tried to imagine he was saying toodleoo to a declining snivelization; and howdy to a warwhoop intelligentsia of redskin possibility with Ann as a vague Cheyenne succubus—the complete buckskin treatment.

But under his window, attendants drifted in a Stone-henge of gas pumps. Fill er up! America seemed to say. A blue, gleaming shaft descended cleanly under the grease rack and a Toyota Corona shot off into the Montana night. Hey! Your Gold Bell Gift Stamps! Poised against the distant, visible mountains, the attendants stood by a rainbow undulance of Marfak.

All the windows were open to the cool high-altitude evening; under the blanket of his rented bed, Payne had the sudden conviction that he was locked in one of the umbral snotlockers of America. On the pine wall overhead,
a Great Falls Beer calendar with Charles Remington reproductions of wolves, buffalo and lonesome cowpokes who tried to establish that with their used-up eyes and plumb-tuckered horses they were entitled to the continent. George Washington had tried the same thing: Throwing coins across a river, he had glommed America from the English. Payne could even understand how, in the early days, Indians, oriented to turkeys and pumpkins, were depleted by unfired blunderbusses, sailboats, maps. Just as Payne felt macadam and bank accounts depriving him of his paramour.

It had been, he felt, another migraine spring. He sat up and bit into an apple, a handsome, cold Northern Spy; blood on the white meat; teeth going bad; tartar; sign of the lower orders; drop them at the dentist; refurbish those now you.

Sleep.

C. J. Clovis, former fat man and entrepreneur of large scale “gadgets” of considerable cost and profit to himself, sat in his Dodge Motor Home, easing a clear lubricant into the bright steel nipple on the upper articulation of his appliance. He smiled admiringly at the machined bevels at its “knee” and saw the little quarter-arcs of ballbearing brighten with oil. Laced neatly to the aluminum foot, with its own argyle, a well-made blucher seemed quite at home.

The built-in television murmured before him: the Johnny Carson show. Clovis flicked it off and rolled out two blueprints on the dining table, weighting the corners with heavy coins of some foreign currency which he produced from his pockets. The plans depicted a model of a bat tower which Clovis would build for America; modern, total engineering of bat enclaves, toward a reduction of
noxious insects in the land. On the prints, the handsomeness of the structures was not hidden; they arose with loftiness from formed concrete piers and had stylish shake-shingle roofs surmounting three tiers of perforations through which the bats could enter. The floor plan, if that is what it must be called, was based loosely on the great temple of Mehantapec in the Guatemalan highlands. That is, the “monks” in this case, bats, dwelt in individual but linked sequences of cells roughly oblong in cross section, each of which debouched into a central chute or shit-scuttle; the accumulation, a valuable fertilizer, could be sold to amortize the tower itself.

The bat tower involved sixteen hundred dollars in materials and labor. Clovis had slapped a price tag of eight thou on the completed item; and considered himself prepared to be beaten down to five. Not lower. Not in a land where mosquitoes carried encephalitis. Next a note to Payne who had been reamed and would not serve: offering him a position as crew boss in an operation dealing in the erection of certain pest control structures, a highly engineered class of dealie. No holds barred financially. Need aggressive young man with eye on main chance. Address me Clovis/Batworks, poste restante, Farrow, North Dakota. All the best.

Clovis worked his way toward the stern and made himself a nightcap: eleven fingers of rye in a rootbeer mug, and adjourned to the toilet for a rapid salvo; a fascinating device, the machine used flame to destroy the excrement. Clovis stood in now slow-witted eleven-finger wonder as the little soldiers accepted the judgment of fire. Like toasted marshmallows holding hands, they became simple shadows and disappeared.