The Bushwacked Piano (6 page)

The instant before he fell asleep in the comfortable double bed, he commenced to feel sad. C. J. Clovis had every
right to believe, as he did, that it was no fun to be shaped like a corncrib under a tarpaulin and to have only one leg. He was already sick of the appliance. He looked out of the high laminated window to Sagittarius on the close night sky feeling the ache of tear ducts under his eyeballs; and thought, soon it will come.…

In the early morning, under Payne’s window, no one moves at all. All along the curb, cars, pick-ups and stake trucks are angled in. The street is dusty in front of rolled awnings, conventional stores in a region where Montgomery Ward sells roping saddles. The Absarokas tower at the south end of Main Street; east of town a fish in whitewashed stones decorates a snuff-colored mountainside, its dorsal exaggerated where children walked too far with their rocks.

At this very moment, Payne should have been seeing Ann. Was it that he feared arrest?

Some time ago, when Payne and Ann had first met and been so interested in one another, Ann went to Spain with one George Russell, a young associate of her father’s. She had in Ann Arbor developed a reaction to the ineffectual group of bridge-playing bohemians who hung around the Union and with whom she, as an
artiste
, spent her time. George, who at least seemed decisive as her new friend Payne did not, convinced her to make the trip. Unlike the bridge players, she thought, George was the kind who could receive and transfer power, big G.M. power. Nevertheless, her societal notions were such that she could, despite her infatuation with Payne, conduct a trial run for her European trip, with George, in a Detroit hotel. As far as Ann was concerned, it was just barely okay. George’s
fiscal acumen was not matched in his bedroom performances. He seemed weirdly unsuitable.

Parenthetically, it was Payne’s upset that impelled his first cross-country motorcycle trip. Her departure made him reckless enough that he overworked the motorcycle and blew a primary chain outside Monroe, Michigan (home of George Armstrong Custer, who went West) at seventy miles an hour; and locked both wheels. He went into a long lazy succession of cosine curves before buying the farm altogether in a burst of dirt and asphalt followed by three shapely fountains of gravel; the last of which darkled the fallen cyclist’s features for only a single instant of that year. No serious injury ensued; just a lot of mortifying road burn. Nine days later, he hightailed it for the Coast.

Thinking of Ann organized Payne’s effort; any enlightenment proceeding from the present freedom of his condition, however irresponsible that freedom may have seemed, would finally devolve happily upon their connubial joys. He would tell her about all his wild days. He would tell her about his motorcycle in the mountains, the blue sheen of Utah glare ice when he rode down the west slope of the Uinta Mountains to fine snowless towns lurid with cold; about eating bloodwurst sandwiches for the three days he was camped in the Escalante Desert and up on the Aquarius Plateau. He would make little mention of the cutie he dogged repeatedly at the entrance of his Eddie Bauer nylon and polyvinyl expeditionary tent whose international burnt-orange signal color brought the attention of a big game hunter down in the timber who watched the fleering fuckery in his 8X32 Leitz Trinovids. The same girl who bought him the Floyd Collins Lilac Brilliantine to hold his hair down on the bike, showed him
some American Space outside of Elko, Nevada, in the bushes near a railroad spur. She liked him to tell her he was a hundred-proof fool who was born standing up and talking back. It had been a beauty autumn with falcons jumping off fence posts like little suicides only to fly away; an autumn of Dunlop K70 racing tires surrounding chromium spokes that made small glittering starscapes in the night. “I’ll take a car any day,” she had said. “You cain’t play the radio own this.”

To see Ann now, well, never mind. I’m fundless. I want to be demeaned by postal money orders. Kiss me. I’m not one of your deadbeats.

A stake truck made a huge, pluming trail of dust coming West from the Boulder River. The dust washed out sideways on the scrub pine, rose high behind the truck and turned red in the early morning sun. Payne had nothing to play his Django Reinhardt records on.

He thought of the two of them becoming one and didn’t like the idea. The shadow of the Waring Blender. Short of sheer conjugality, he didn’t see why that would be any better than the billiard collisions that marked their erratic, years-long circling of one another.

If only he could see her. That was the thing. Not an idea. A thing of a certain weight. They would wander through the bones of an old buffalo jump, picking up flakes of jasper and obsidian, pausing now and again for that primordial rhumba known to all men. She would have a Victrola for his Django Reinhardt records. They would lurch and twitch from the dawnlit foothills to the sweet sunset-shattered finality of the high lonesome.

Held in abeyance, the question of Clovis, whose letter, queerly put, suggested to Payne a chance of productive movement, a set of brackets for this other. But to respond
to Clovis’ offer frightened him a little, like jumping a train, not for what it vouchsafed immediately; but for what it threatened in the long run. Once started, how stop? How does the foreman of a pest control project retire?

He wrote to Clovis and said, I’m your man; come get me. I have an operating radius of fifty miles, a need of: clean sheets, alcoholic beverages in reasonable quantities, harmless drugs, one Tek natural-bristle toothbrush with rubber gum massager, sufficient monies to clean or fix four pair Levis, four gaudy cowboy shirts, eight pair army socks, one Filson waterproof coat, one down-filled vest, one sleeping bag in the shape of a mummy, one pair Vibram-sole hiking boots, one pair Nocona Elegante boots with bulldogging heels and stovepipe tops, one scarf by Emilio Pucci, one pair artilleryman’s mittens with independent triggerfinger and one After Six tuxedo.

He accepted, in other words, Clovis’ offer with a sense that with the addition of this job to his routine, his life could be reconstituted like frozen orange juice.

Implacably, he would bring himself to Ann’s attention in a way that reached beyond mere argument and calling of the police.

He would become a legend.

It is five o’clock in the morning of the Fourth of July on the fairgrounds at Livingston, Montana.

The day before, Payne sat in the grandstands in unholy fascination as Tony Haberer of Muleshoe, Texas, turned in a ride on a bucking horse that Payne felt was comparable to the perfect faenas of El Viti he had seen at the Plaza Mayor. One moment, stilled in his mind now, Haberer standing in the stirrups, the horse’s head between his feet, the hind feet high over Haberer’s head, Haberer’s spine curved gracefully back from the waist, his left hand high in the air and as composed as the twenty-dollar Stetson straw at rest on his head: a series of these, sometimes reversed with the horse on its hind legs shimmying in the air, spurs making electric contact with the shoulders of the outlaw horse, then down, then up, then down until the time is blown from the judge’s stand and the horse is arcing across the sand in a crazy gallop; a pick-up rider is alongside the bucking, lunatic animal, the bronc rider reaches arms to him and unseats himself, glides alongside the other horse—the outlaw bucking still in wild empty-saddle
arcs by itself—and lands on his feet to: instant slow motion. Haberer crosses to the bronc chute with perfect composure; lanolin-treated goatskin gloves, one finger touches the brim up of the perfect pale Stetson with the towering crown; the shirt blouses elegantly in folds of bruised plum; faded overlong Levi’s drop to scimitar boots that are clouded with inset leather butterflies. Payne sweats all over:
Make it me!

But at five o’clock in the morning of the Fourth of July in the arena of the Livingston, Montana, fairgrounds, one day after Haberer rode, Payne crouched in a starting position in the calf chute. In the next chute, his quarter horse backed to the boards, Jim Dale Bohleen, a calf roper from the sandhills of West Nebraska, slid the honda up his rope and made a loop. He swung the loop two times around his head, flipped it forward in an elongated parabola and roped the front gate post; then, throwing a hump down the rope, he jumped the loop off the post, retrieved his rope, made his loop again, hung its circularity beside him with the back of the loop held tight under his elbow, leaned way forward over the saddle horn, his ass against the cantle and his spurs back alongside the flank strap. “Any time you are,” he said to Payne.

Payne sprinted out of the calf chute, running zigzag across the graded dirt. Jim Dale gave him a headstart, then struck the quarter horse which came flat out from the chute, the rider rising forward, his looping rope already aloft for the moment it took to catch Payne, then darting out around Payne, tightening around his shoulders to an imperceptible instant as Jim Dale Bohleen dallied his end of the rope hard and fast around the saddle horn to flip Payne head over heels, the long thin rope making a gentle arc at the moment of impact, between the saddlehorn and Payne. The horse skidded to a stop and, backing very
slightly to tighten the rope, dragged Payne. Jim Dale was upon him now, lashing hands and feet with his pigging string.

Payne lay there, feeling the grit between his lips and teeth. Beyond the judge’s stand he saw the Absaroka Mountains, the snow in the high country, the long, traveling clouds snared on peaks. He remembered the record player over yesterday’s loudspeaker—“I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart”—its needle jumping the grooves as six broncs kicked the timbers under the judge’s stand to pieces.

“Two more,” Jim Dale says, lazily coiling his rope between his hand and his elbow, “and I’ll teach you how to work a bronc saddle.” Payne heads for the calf chute.

The Fitzgeralds had box seats. They were almost the only rodeo patrons who were not in the grandstand and were consequently islanded among empty boxes. Mister, Missus and Ann Fitzgerald sat with Fitzgerald’s foreman. He had been hired by the realtors who were managing the Fitzgerald ranch and keeping its books at a hefty fee. This was Wayne Codd. The ranch itself was one of a valleyload of write-offs, being sleepily amortized by the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

Wayne Codd was a young, darkly stupid man from Meeteetse, Wyoming. His eyes, small and close, suggested an alternative set of nostrils at the other end of his nose. It would not be fair to take unexplained peaks of Codd’s recent history and evaluate him without talking of his past; it is possible, for example, that he was run over by an automobile quite a few times as an infant.

One of Codd’s tricks was to drag his saddle out of the back of his GMC and take it into a bar where he would strap it on a stool, placed in the center of the dance floor,
and make some little clerk sit in it all evening by slapping the piss out of him every time he tried to dismount. From time to time, Wayne Codd had been shot and stabbed with various weapons; but had not died.

Codd made no secret of his attitude toward the elder Fitzgeralds. He often said,
“Duuh!”
to Fitzgerald’s obvious remarks and sometimes called him Mister Dude P. Greenhorn.

did Codd hide his scratching lust for Ann. The Fitzgeralds had a little bathhouse near the stream from which their ranch was irrigated; and one day when he was supposed to have been repairing the headgate, Wayne Codd lay under its green pine floor, the interstices of whose boards allowed him a searing look at Ann’s crotch. Two days later, he blew a week’s salary on a Polaroid Swinger which he stored in an iceskate carrying case under the bathhouse.

It seemed to take so long to get through the drearier events. The barrel races, wild cow milking contests, synchronized group riding by local riding clubs often composed entirely of ranch ladies with super-fat asses, wouldn’t stop. “Let’s hear it for Wayne Ballard and his Flying White Clouds!” cried the announcer after a singularly fatuous event in which an underfed zootsuiter shot around the ring with his feet divided between two stout Arabians.

In the far towering Absarokas, a gopher and a rattlesnake faced off under an Engelmann’s spruce. Mountain shadows, saturated with ultraviolet light, sifted forty miles down the slopes toward the Livingston fairgrounds. And far, far above this confrontation between two denizens of the ultramontane forest, a cosmonaut snoozed in negative gravity and had impure thoughts about a tart he met in Leningrad or Kiev, he forgot which.

“Folks,” said the announcer mellifluously, “ah wont to speak to you about croolity to animals. We have got the broncs coming up here in a minute or two. And as some of you good people already know, certain bleeding hort spatial intrust groups is claiming croolity on this account. But I wont you good people to see it this way: If you wasn’t watching these broncs here today, you’d be lickin the pore devils on some postage stamp.” Far, far from the grandstands and box seats, the announcer raised hopeful hands to those who would see.

And announced the next six riders on the card.

The first was Chico Horvath of Pray, Montana. “Let’s try the horse, cowboy! Yer prize money’s awaitin!” Chico got himself bounced right badly and marred the stately cowboy’s retreat with a slight forward bend from the waist indicating damage to the stomach. A clown ran out and collapsed in the dirt, jumped in and out of a barrel, frequently permitting his pants to fall down. Two good rides followed, in the order of their appearances, by Don Dimmock of Baker, Oregon, on a horse named Apache Sunrise, and Chuck Extra of Kaycee, Wyoming, on Nightmare. The fourth rider, Carl Tiffin of Two Dot, Montana, was trampled by a part-Morgan horse name of Preparation H. The fifth rider scratched.