The Bushwacked Piano (2 page)

The homecoming itself was awash in vague remembered detail; the steamer dock on Sugar Island looked draped in rain. He remembered that. It was a wet, middling season in Michigan; he forgot which one. There were a number of them. And this: the condemned freighter
Maida
towed by tugs toward a chalky wafer of sun, toward the lead-white expanse of Detroit River, black
gleaming derricks, slag—the whole, lurid panorama of cloacal American nature smarm debouching into Lake Erie where—when Payne was duck hunting—a turn of his oar against the bottom brought up a blue whirring nimbus of petroleum sludge and toxic, coagulant effluents the glad hand of national industry wants the kids to swim in. This was water that ran in veins. This was proud water that wouldn’t mix. This was water whose currents drove the additives aloft in glossy pools and gay poison rainbows. This was water the walking upon of which scarcely made for a miracle.

Moping on an abandoned coal dock, Payne rehearsed his imagined home. He tried by main force to drag back the bass-filled waters he actually remembered. He dreamed up picturesque visions of long packed lawns planing to the river and the lake in a luminous haze beyond. He recollected freighters and steamers sailing by, the side-wheeled and crystal-windowed palaces of the D & C Line that had so recently gone in stately parade up the Canadian channel, the sound of their orchestras borne across the water to Grosse Ile.

But this time the
Maida
toiled before him on the septic flow, vivid with arrows of rust thrusting downward from dismal scuppers. On deck, a handful of men rather specifically rued the day. Life in the U.S.A. gizzard had changed. Only a clown could fail to notice.

So then, failing to notice would be a possibility. Consequently, he fell in love with a girl named Ann who interested herself in the arts, who was quite beautiful and wild; and who, as no other, was onto Payne and who, to an extent that did not diminish him, saw through Payne. In the beginning, theirs was one of those semichemical, tropistic encounters that seem so romantic in print or on film. Ann had a beautiful, sandy, easy and crotch-tightening voice;
and, responding to it, Payne had given her the whole works, smile after moronic smile, all those clean, gleaming, square, white teeth that could only be produced by a region which also produced a large quantity of grain, cereals and corn—and stopped her in her tracks to turn at this, this what? this
smiler
, his face corrugated with the idiocy of
desire
and the eclectic effects of transcontinental motorcycle windburn, a grin of keenness, blocky, brilliant, possibly deranged. And stared at him!

He went to her house. He croaked
be mine
from behind the rolled windows of his Hudson Hornet which in the face of her somewhat handsome establishment appeared intolerably shabby. He felt a strange tension form between his car and the house. The mint-green Hornet was no longer his joy. The stupid lurch of its paint-can pistons lacked an earlier charm. The car was now spiritually unequal to him. The wheel in his hands was far away, a Ferris wheel. The coarse fabric of the seats extended forever. All gauges: dead. The odometer stuttered its first repetition in 1953 when Payne was a child. A month ago he’d had a new carburetor installed. When he lifted the hood, it sickened him to see that bright tuber of fitted steel in the vague rusted engine surfaces. The offensive innocence of mushrooms. A thing like that takes over. A pale green spot on a loaf of bread is a fright wig inside of a week. These little contrasts unhinge those who see them. The contrast between his car and her house was doing that now. He could barely see through the windshield, but clear glass would have been unendurable. The world changed through these occlusions. Objects slid and jumped behind his windshield as he passed them. He knew exactly how a building would cross its expanse progressively then jump fifteen degrees by optical magic. Don’t make me go in that house. Just at the center of the
windshield a bluish white line appeared like a tendril turning round itself downward and exploded in a perfect fetal lizard nourished by the capillaries that spread through the glass.

Gradually, he worked himself from the machine, went to the door, was admitted, went through to the back where Ann Fitzgerald was painting a white trellis and, paint brush in her right hand, dripping pale paint stars in the dirt. “Yes,” she said, “I will.” Indicating only that she would see him again. “Stay where you are,” she said. An instant later she photographed him with a large, complex-looking camera. “That will be all,” she smiled.

The steamer dock, the former property of the Sugar Island Amusement Company, defunct 1911, was a long balconied pier half-slumped under water. Near the foot of the pier, abandoned in the trees, was an evocative assortment of pavilions, ticket stands and stables. There were two carved and lofty ramps that mounted, forthright, into space. And the largest building, in the same style as the pavilion, was a roller rink. This building had come to be half-enveloped in forest.

It was nighttime and the ears of Nicholas Payne were filled with the roar of his roller-skated pursuit of the girl, Ann, at speed over the warped and undulant hardwood floor. He trailed slightly because he glided down the slopes in a crouch while she skated down; and so she stayed in front and they roared in a circle shuddering in and out of the light of the eight tall windows. Payne saw the moon stilled against the glass of one unbroken pane, gasped something like
watch me now
and skated more rapidly as the wooden sound sank deeper into his ears and the mirrored pillar that marked the center of the room glittered in the corner of his eye; he closed the distance
until she was no longer cloudy and indefinite in the shifting light but brightly clear in front of him with the short pleatings of skirt curling close around the soft insides of thigh. And Payne in a bravura extension beyond his own abilities shot forward on one skate, one leg high behind him like a trick skater in a Dutch painting, reached far ahead of himself, swept his hand up a thigh and had her by the crotch. Then, for this instant’s bliss, he bit the dust, hitting the floor with his nose dragging like a skeg, landing stretched out, chin resting straight forward and looking at the puffy, dreamy vacuity midway in her panties. Ann Fitzgerald, feet apart, sitting, ball-bearing wooden wheels still whirring, laughed to herself and to him and said, “You asshole.”

It was one of those days when life seemed little more than pounding sand down a rat hole. He went for a ride in his Hudson Hornet and got relief and satisfaction. For the time allowed, he was simply a motorist.

After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time that they had gone together.

He had it on good evidence—a verified sighting—that Ann was seeing, that afternoon, an old intimate by the name of George Russell. There was an agreement covering that. It was small enough compensation for the fact that she had lit out for Europe with this bird only a year before, at a time when the mutual trust Payne imagined had grown up between them should have made it impossible to look at another man. Afterwards, between them, there had transpired months of visceral blurting that left them desolated but also, he thought, “still in love.” Now, again, George Russell raised his well-groomed head. His Vitalis lay heavy upon the land.

The affair of Payne and Ann had been curious. They had seen each other morning, noon and night for the better part of quite some time. Her parents, Duke and Edna Fitzgerald, were social figments of the motor money; and they did not like Nicholas Payne one little bit. Duke said he was a horse who wasn’t going to finish. Edna said he just didn’t figure.

But Payne and Ann saw each other morning, noon and night. A certain amount of that time was inevitably spent up to no good. For Payne—and for Ann too—the whole thing seemed one of life’s maniacal evocations, a dimensional reach-through, heaven.

Once, for instance, they were on Payne’s little boat; he was in the cabin, adjusting the flame on the parabolic butane heater. Ann was on the bunk beside him, Payne in a Jesuitical hysteria of cross-purposes. Ann, clearly, prettily, waited for it. And Payne gave her one too, just like that. He looked underneath as he mounted her: a herring leaping from bank to bank, a marine idyll. Ann, for her part, should have never told him to hold on to his hat; because for an alarming instant he just couldn’t get going at all. She patted him with encouragement and told him we were a big boy now. She slipped her ankles up behind his knees. Payne felt as though he were inflating, becoming a squeaking surface that enlarged getting harder and paler, a weather balloon rising through the stratosphere, merely a collapsed sack at the beginning, growing rounder and thinner with altitude, then the burst and long crazy fall to the ocean.

Afterwards they watched a Lake Erie sunset together; a bleached and watery sun eased itself down on the horizon and broke like a blister, seeping red light over the poison lake. They could count the seven stacks of the Edison Electric Company. They smelled with affection the effluents
of Wyandotte Chemical. They slept in one another’s arms on the colloidal, slightly radioactive swell.

Next day, he had a little hang-over. He smoked grass and consequently had the notion his chair was singing in a languid Dick Haymes voice. Outside, he was convinced the sky had been vulcanized. He tried to call Ann and got her mother who was cool to him. She reminded Payne that the whole family was packing to go to the ranch in Montana and that maybe it would be better if Payne called at the end of the summer.

Payne still could not believe that Ann would spend a minute with the other one. It broke his heart to think so. Her family hated him. She was always reluctant because of that to have him in the house at all. They knew he wasn’t working. They had seen him on motorcycles and felt he had thrown his education away. Now, on the phone, Ann’s porcine mother had it in her heart to tell him to wait until the end of summer to call. Payne doted on the pleasure it would bring to shoot the old cunt in the spine.

“Bartender,” Payne said, “my glass is leaking.” He looked at the flashing sign of the Pontchartrain Bar, visible from in here. “Have you ever tasted cormorant?”

He didn’t know George Russell, the other, but he didn’t hesitate to call him on the phone. “Listen George,” he said, “I demand a cessation of stupidities on your part.”

“Oh, Payne,” George said with pity.

“I want to help you.”

“Ah, Payne, please not that.”

“I remember you said once George that you could not live without lapels.”

“I didn’t say that,” said George with a debonair tone.

“I cannot live without lapels.”

“That’s not true. Are you drunk or taking dope?”

“Whether it’s true or not, why did you say it?”

“I didn’t say it.”

“What could it mean?”

“I didn’t say it.”

“What could that mean? ‘I cannot live without lapels’?”

“Payne,” George interrupted. “Can you live with this: Ann has been seeing me. Can you?” All Payne could remember about George was that he was what dentists call a mouthbreather. He had decent teeth which he had bought at an auction of Woodrow Wilson’s effects. George hung up. Payne had one foot in the abyss.

Someone put some change in the jukebox. Two couples who knew each other materialized in a sentimental jitterbug. It was the kind of thing sailors did with each other and with brooms when they were brokenhearted on aircraft carriers in World War Two, flight deck jitterbugs with the kamikazes coming in for the coup de grace; it was the very dance a bosun’s mate and a chief petty officer might have done a hundred and fifty-three miles out of Saipan with an eighty-five piece Navy orchestra playing Flatfoot Floogie on top of four hundred thousand tons of high explosives in a state of being approached by a religious Japanese in a bomb plane.

Payne headed back to his table, but some oddball had glommed it. “Who’s the oddball?” he asked the bartender.

“You are.”

“I saw a sign in the urinal that said ‘Please do not eat the mints.’ This goes for you.” The bartender forced a laugh, throwing back his head so that Payne could examine the twin black ovals divided by the stem of his nose. He went to his table anyway, carrying a fresh whiskey. “Tell me about your family,” he said to the oddball.

“Three of us is all,” smiled the other, “two dogs and a snake.” Payne looked at him, feeling his brain torque
down into its first focus of the evening. The man picked up one of his galoshes from the floor and held it to his own ear. “I can hear Akron, Ohio,” he announced. Payne was enthralled.

The man was sloppy and stretched-looking. Seeing Payne look, he boasted of having been most monstrously fat.

“Guess.”

“Two hundred,” Payne said.

“Close. Five years ago, I weighed four eighty. C. J. Clovis. You call me Jack.” He pushed himself up. He was missing a leg. Then Payne saw the crutches. Clovis was neckless, not burly, and his head just sat in the soft puddle of his shoulders. “I lost more weight than I can lift!” He directed Payne’s attention to the various malformations of his skeleton produced by the vanished weight. The hips were splayed, for example. “My feet went flat! I had varicose veins popping on me! Danger looked from every which way!” He told Payne about his two friends in the Upper Peninsula who both weighed over four hundred and who, like Clovis, were brokenhearted because at that weight they couldn’t get any pussy. Therefore, they took a vow to lose all their excess. He dieted under the care of a doctor; his friends went on crashes of their own design. In the beginning he had reduced too fast and, consequently, as his body fed off itself, gave himself gout.