The Bushwacked Piano (18 page)

His vision, however, had improved; to the effect that the world no longer appeared as a circular vista at the end of a conduit. His urge to ride on the highway was now a quiet, tingling mania.

“Let us hear from you,” the Fitzgeralds said when the kissing had stopped.

“Sure will,” Ann said, “I’ll drop you a line one of these days.” Her parents looked at her. They needed the right word and quick. Something had gone entirely dead here.

“Let us know if you need anything,” her mother tried.

“Yeah, right.” Payne started to back around. “Take it easy,” Ann said. And they left.

“I guess,” Ann said after they had driven a while, “it had gotten to be time for me to cut out.”

“All right,” Payne said, “now take it easy.”

“Darling, I’m upset.”

“Yes, me too. My head is all fouled up.”

“I feel like a hoor,” she said. Payne felt a distant obligation to contradict her.

They passed through the box canyon of the Yellowstone where the venturi effect of chinook winds will lift a half-ton pickup right to the top of its load leveler shocks and make the driver think of ghost riders in the sky until the springs seat again and the long invisible curves of wind unknit and drive him through the canyon as though his speed were laid on him as paint.

Some hours later, Ann seemed to have fallen into a bad mood. “Where are we going?”

“Bat country,” said Payne. That quieted her down.

“You know what?” she asked later.

“What?”

“This damn car of yours is coming off on my clothes.”

At Apollinaris Spring, Ann thought: My God, if George ever saw me pull a low-rent trick like this! In fact that’s something to think about. She began to record the voyage with her camera.

They dropped down into Wyoming and headed for Lander, running through implausible country where Sacajawea and Gerald McBoingBoing fought for the table scraps of U.S.A. history.

Coming down through Colorado, still west of the Divide, they passed a small intentional community—people their own age—all of whose buildings were geodesic domes made of the tops of junked automobiles. Payne could see gardens, a well, a solar heater and wanted to go down. But the members of the community were all crowding around down there and rubbing each other. They were packing in down there and Payne felt the awful shadow of the Waring Blender and drove on. Ann was mad. “Why won’t you mix, God damn it?” I read Schopenhauer, Payne thought,
that tease!

They headed for Durango, stayed for a day, then dropped into New Mexico and headed for Big Spring, Texas.

They cut across Amarillo and made a beeline for Shreveport on a red-hot autumn day to Columbia, Florida, where Payne had been sent in the first place by Cletus James Clovis. This was bat country. Payne took a piece of paper out of his pocket. A short time later, he was knocking on the door of a reconditioned sharecropper’s house.
When the man opened the door, Payne saw the wall behind covered with curing gator skins. “C. J. Clovis said to see you about bats,” Payne said. The poacher told them to come in and have something cool to drink.

A day later, Payne, with his biggest hang-over ever, and his companion, the poacher Junior Place, with a big one of his own; and Ann snoozing in the Hornet with an actual puker of a white lightning hang-over and her peroxide beehive full of sticks and bits of crap of one description or another, and the North Florida sun coming in like a suicide; the men paused at the end of the sandy road in the palmettos beside a pile of wrecked automobiles each of which held a little glass-and-metal still—the product of which drew a considerably better price locally than any bonded sauce you could find out at your shopping plaza. Payne was flattered at this confidential disclosure.

They had little distance to go. Junior had loaned Payne a pair of his own snakeproof pants—citrus picker’s trousers with heavy-gauge screen sewn inside a canvas sleeve from the knee down. And the two of them crossed the palmettos on a gradually upward incline, near the crest of which Junior Place began to scout back and forth for the mouth of the cave.

He told Payne to feel as best he could for a breeze. So Payne wandered the crest of the hill, feeling for a breeze that came to him shortly as a breath of something cool and watery, something subterranean rising around him. He found the entrance in a cluster of brush from which a solid cool shaft of air poured. He called out its location.

The two men carried triangular nets on long hardwood poles. Payne had his nine-battery Ray-O-Vac and Junior Place carried a carbide lamp. Junior came over and pushed aside the brush to reveal a coal-black oval in the
ground, a lightless hole through which he slid as from long practice.

It proves one thing about Payne that he followed straightaway. He wanted to maintain voice contact. “How do you know C. J. Clovis?”

“Hardly know him a tall,” said Place. There was no way of knowing the immensity of this blackness; it sucked away Payne’s voice without an echo.

There were things going by his head at tremendous speed. “I had a five-minute talk with the man,” said Place. “He is a freak of nature.” The blackness pressed Payne’s face. “I’d do anything in the world for him. Come up side of me now. Okay, use the lamp.” The lights went on. The paleness of the limestone hall surprised and terrified Payne. The colliding planes of wall and ceiling appeared serene and futuristic and cold. Every overhead surface was festooned with bats. They were all folded, though some, alive to the presence of the men, craned around; and a few dropped and flew squeaking crazily through the beams of light. Then a number more came down, whirled through the room with the others; and as if by signal they all returned to the ceiling.

They set the lights where they would give them advantageous illumination; and with the long-handled nets commenced scraping pole-breaking loads from the ceiling. A million bats exploded free and circulated through the chamber in a crescendo of squeaking. They upended the bats in the plastic mesh bags and continued swiping over head. By now, they needed only to hold the nets aloft and they would fill until they could not be held overhead.

Bats poured at Payne like jet engine exhaust; pure stripes and curves of solid hurtling bats filled the air to saturation. The rush and squeaking around Payne were making him levitate. As when the dogs were in the house,
he no longer knew which way his head or feet were pointing. He had no idea where the entrance was. Junior Place continued at the job, a man hoeing his garden. Payne whirled like a propeller.

When it was over, Payne had to be led out of the cave, carrying his net and shopping bag. There was an awful moment as the entrance began to pack all around him with escaping bats. When he finally stood outside the hole, he watched a single, towering black funnel, its point at the hole, form and tower over him.

He would have to tell Clovis: a tower actually made of bats.

They liberated the bats in the wagon behind the Hudson. The bats circulated, a wild squeaking whirlwind, before sticking to the screen sides to squeak angrily out at the men. Some of the bats, their umbrella wings partially open, crept awkwardly around the bottom of the wagon before clinging to the screened sides. Soon a number of them were hanging from the roof adaptably.

“Do you have any idea what a hang-over is like in the face of that?” Ann asked the two men.

They said goodbye to Junior Place at the end of the road. Payne returned the pants, gingerly fishing his own from the wagon.

Ann slumped against him and fell asleep once more. Place, at the end of his white lightning road, waved a straw hat and held his nets overhead at the edge of a palmetto wilderness in his snakeproof pants.

Payne aimed the load for Key West.

They woke up in the morning in the sleeping bag beside the car. The bats were running all over the wire. They already knew Payne was the one who fed them: banana and bits of dessicated hamburger.

Across a wet field in the morning in the peat smell of North Central Florida and surrounded by a wall of pines stood a rusting, corrugated steel shed with daylight coming through its sides variously. From one end, the rear quarters of a very large field mule projected; and the animal could be heard cropping within. On the broad corrugated side of the shed itself in monstrous steamboat letters, filigree draining from every corner,

FAYE’S
GIFT
SHOPPE

Payne fed the bats and started coffee on the camp stove while, her hair teased into something unbelievable, Ann shot over to Faye’s. By the time the coffee was ready, she
was back at the car with long gilt earrings hanging from her ears. “Check these,” she said. “Wouldn’t they be great for when we went dancing?”

“They would be that.”

They could have made the Keys by nightfall. But Ann wanted to stop at a roadhouse near Homestead where she played all the Porter Wagoner, Merle Haggard, Jeannie C. Riley, Buck Owens and Tammy Wynette records on the jukebox and danced with a really unpromising collection of South Florida lettuce-pickers and midcountry drifters. Then Payne got too drunk to drive; so they slept one more night on the road at the edge of the ’glades with the bats squeaking and wanting to fly in the dark, wanting to go someplace, and Payne remembering in a way that made him upset the aborigine of ten years before.

In his liquor stupefaction—and rather woozy anyway from the tropic sogginess and the streaked red sky and the sand flies and mosquitoes and the completely surprising softness of the air and the recent memory of the yanking jukebox dancing—he was just a little alarmed by Ann’s ardor at bedtime. She had the camera within reach and he was afraid she would pull something kinky. And then he was just detached from everything that was happening to him; so that he saw, as from afar, Ann commit a primitive oral stimulation of his parts. Engorged, frankly, as though upon a rutabaga, her slender English nose was lost in a cloud of pubic hair. They had the sleeping bag open, underneath the wagon, in case it rained. Ann detected Payne’s reserve and aggressively got atop of him, hauling at his private. There was so little room that each time her buttocks lifted, they bumped the underside of the wagon and sent the bats surging and squeaking overhead. She facetiously filled the humid evening with Wagnerian love grunts.

They hit A1A heading down through Key Largo, the mainland becoming more and more streaked with water and the land breaking from large to small pieces until finally they were in the Keys themselves, black-green mangrove humps stretching to the horizon and strung like beads on the highway. Loused up as everything else in the country, it was still land’s end.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Payne finally asked.

Ann turned a face to him as expressionless as a pudding under the glued, brilliant hair.

“What do I think I’m doing?” she repeated as though to a whole roomful of people.

On either side, the serene seascapes seemed to ridicule the nasty two-lane traffic with monster argosy cross-country trucks domineering the road in both directions. From time to time, in the thick of traffic problems, Payne would look off on the pale sand flats and see spongers with long-handled rakes standing in the bows of their wooden boats steering the rickety outboard motors with clothesline tied to their waists. Then below Islamorada he saw rusty trailers surrounded by weedy piles of lobster traps, hard-working commercial fishermen living in discarded American road effluvia.

In Marathon, a little elevation gave him the immensity of the ocean in a more prepossessing package—less baby blue—and he saw what a piss-ant portion of the terraqueous globe the land really is. They stopped to eat and Payne had turtle. The end of that street was blocked with the jammed-in immense bows of four shrimpers. Their trawling booms were tangled overhead. He could read
Southern Cross
,
Miss Becky
,
Tampa Clipper
and
Witchcraft
. On the deck of the
Tampa Clipper
, a fisherman in a
wooden chair, his hat pulled over his eyes, and half-awake, gave the finger to a lady who sighted him through the view finder of her Kodak. When she gave up, his arm fell to the side of the chair, his head settled at an easier angle. He was asleep.

Suddenly, they were in the middle of Key West and lost with a wagonload of bats lurching behind them in side streets where it was hard to make a turn in the first place. They passed the Fifth Street Baptist Church and read its motto on a sign in front:

W
HERE
F
RIENDLINESS
I
S A
H
ABIT
AND
P
ARKING
I
S
N
OT A
P
ROBLEM
.

They ran into the old salt pond and had to backtrack. They cut down Tropical Avenue to Seminary Street down Seminary to Grinnell out Grinnell to Olivia and down Olivia to Poorhouse Lane where they got the car jammed and had to enlist the neighborhood; who helped until they got a good look and backed off, saying,
“Bats!”