The Bushwacked Piano (9 page)

“—think I’m
atomic powered
or some damn thing.”

“
Atomic powered!
Oh, God kid, you’re gonna go.”

Unable to think of it any more, Ann went out onto the terrace in the dark. Overhead, the standard decal moon of Spain hung under the auspices of the Falange. Under such circumstances, it was scarcely a bustle of nard.

She had fallen in love with Payne; or at least with the idea of that.

• •

Payne dozed achily in his wagon, the roar of Bangtail Creek nearby. When Ann had come home from Europe she found Payne crazy. They rented a little house for a week. And stayed together.

Payne dozed and woke in completely unspecific exhaustion. Every night the dogs had come into the house. He knew they were down there. He always knew. He watched them for months. He looked for heads but could only see a glitter of eyes in his penlight. He never knew their number. He was not afraid. He let them drink from his toilet. He kept it clean for them. He left food but they wouldn’t take it. He was never afraid. One week. She stayed and saw them. She held the penlight and they both saw them. They figured twelve feet and they divided that into four dogs. It could have been three dogs. They thought with terror that it could have been two dogs. Sometimes they giggled and talked about it being one dog. They heard them drink. They didn’t know. It made them fastidious about the toilet. They didn’t forget to flush in times like that. They knew the dogs were coming. They kept it clean. They made love and talked about the dogs. Payne was trying to put his suspension system back in order. For quite a while there it was okay. He needed to get in touch there again though. It was like some kind of middle ear trouble. He woke up and couldn’t tell which way he was pointing, whether it was his head or his feet that were pointing toward the door. When the dogs came he would really start whirling. Maybe he should have shooed them out. He didn’t see the point of that. Neither did Ann. He was awfully crossed up and the dogs didn’t hurt and later Ann said that there had not been any dogs. He was fielding grounders. It had been hot all day. He imagined that all the leaves had turned.
That everything outside was bright with frost. That winter was not far away. He did not know about that. It wasn’t that he wanted winter. He wanted to get his white Christmases off a bank calendar.

“It’s all in your head,” Ann said. Which was exactly right. Not that anyone was ever helped by that kind of idle information. But she tried so hard, so awfully hard. No she didn’t. She didn’t try all that hard. She always nailed him with that fucking Art. What Gauguin did. What Dostoyevsky did. What Lozenge did. He told Ann everything. True and false. She showed a preference for the false. He told her stories of Grandma making mincemeat in the late autumn up in Alberta with her great tallow-colored buttocks showing through her shabby frock. It was all false, all untrue, all gratuitous. She made a whole view of him out of it. A whole history. A whole artistic story of his childhood.

Then Ann began to catch up. She saw he had invented himself
ab ovo
. She was upset. After the first chink, he pissed away everything. She called him a mirage. That was the end of their week. She really laced into him. Underhanded stuff. Subliminal broadsides. But the mirage business hurt his feelings. There were certain areas where he was not a mirage. Period. There were certain areas where he was implacable, don’t you know.

He kicked her out. Ann found out he was not a mirage in a way that brought her up short rather fast. Irony of being kicked out of the house by a mirage. He liked that sense of things. The recoil factor of reality. Now he couldn’t see it. That kind of impatience. But he had been pressed. Two years of the most needle-nosed harassment from home.

Ten days later he saw her. A high-school science exhibit.
He remembered it exactly. Ann was there. Right where they could see each other. There was a glass-enclosed diorama against the wall. It was supposed to be Patagonia. He remembered one tree full of plaster fruit. Looked like grenades. Hanging over everything on these thousands of fine wires was a cloud of blue parakeets. He left without a word. The most overweening cheap kind of pride. Not speaking. He would pay.

A false spring night. He was out in the garden behind the house. He had a cloth sack of sunflower seeds. He was drunk. He pushed the seeds into the dirt with his forefinger. The sky looked like the roof of the diorama. This was Patagonia. He was part of the exhibit. He did not consistently believe that. He did not believe it now. But he will believe it again.

At the instance of his mother, a red-beezered monsignor was soon found in the wings, ready to counsel him. The monsignor told Payne that if he kept “it” up he would roast like a mutton over eternal fire. Whatever it was that Payne answered, it made the monsignor leap with agitation. It nearly came to blows.

Payne ascended the stairs of the bank building to the county treasurer’s office. He was looking for a job. The stairs circled above the green skylight of the bank on the first floor. Somehow the whole beastly building started to bulge, started to throb. And he dropped his briefcase through the skylight. A file clerk looked up at him through the hole. And Payne saw that it was better to be looked up at through the hole, crazy as you were, than to be the file clerk looking.

He began thinking in terms of big time life changes, of art and motorcycles, mountains, dreams and rivers.

Stay for the sunrise. This dude is the color of strawberry. It creeps up Bangtail Creek and flowers through spruce. It stripes the ceiling of the wagon, tints the porous Hudson, and makes, through the screen, something
wild
of Payne’s face.

Unbeknownst to Payne, a rare blackfooted ferret, which to a colony of gophers is somewhere between C. C. Rider and Stagger Lee, darted from its lair and crossed County Road 67 between Rainy Butte and Buffalo Springs, North Dakota; not far, actually, from the Cedar, which is the south fork of the Cannonball River. This rare tiny savage crittur came very close to being (accidentally) run over by C(letus) J(ames) Clovis, the round-man of total bat tower dreams, who pressed Westward in his Dodge Motor Home.

In a single swoop, Clovis had justified at least a summer’s expenditure. Using only local labor and acting himself as strawboss, he raised his bat tower in the West and provided the first bugfree conditions for the American Legion picnic in Farrow, North Dakota. He had watched with a certain joy the bats ditch their high native buttes and come clouding in along the dry washes and gravel bars, through willows and cottonwood, bats in trees and sky pouring like smoke from their caves and holes, bluffs
and hollow mesa dwellings, toward the first Western Clovis Batwork with its A-1 accommodations. At the little “Mayan” entrances, there were bat battles. It was—and had to be—first come first served. For a short time, the rats in the bats prevailed; on the little tiered loggias, fearful bat war broke out. And underneath, a worried C. J. Clovis stood with his first client, Dalton Trude, mayor of Farrow, and listened to the distant scuffle. Presently, victims of the fray began to fall; black Victorian gloves; deathflap.

But once things settled down and the various freak bats of anarchy were either knocked off or sent back to the bluffs, Clovis could see that the tower would work. Two days later, the picnic was held and at dusk the bats gathered high over the hot dogs, fried chicken and a whole shithouseload of potato salad. Quite on its own, a cheer went up. Hurrah! Hurrah for them bats! Hurrah for American Legion Farrow Chapter Picnic! Hurrah for C. J. Clovis of Savonarola Batworks Inc. Hurrah!

Clovis set out.

He nearly hit a blackfooted ferret. He crossed the Cedar or south fork of the Cannonball River between Rainy Butte and Buffalo Springs, North Dakota.

C. J. Clovis headed for Montana.

A lowering sky carried smoke from the pulp mill through Livingston. Payne looked at rodeo pictures on the wall of the Longbranch Saloon, refused another drink with a righteous flourish. During the night the northwesternmost block of Main Street burned to the ground. The twenty-four residents of the Grand Hotel escaped without harm. A fireman ran in confusion out of a dress shop carrying a flaming dummy, crying, “You’ll be all right!” The
dummy was not all right. It turned into a pool of burning plastic and gave off noxious black smoke for hours. A pair of chaps belonging to a man who had been on the burial detail at the Battle of the Little Big Horn were lost without trace. So was a Mexican saddletree with a silver pommel. So was a faggot’s collection of bombazine get-ups. So was a bird, a trap, a bolo. All that truck, without a trace.

Payne walked around the fire zone. Adamant volunteers capered around the hook-and-ladder, dousing ashes and trying things out. The hotel appeared to be quite all right; but the lack of windows, the unusual darkness of the interior said no one was home. Possibly only a Commie.

Glass was scattered clear across Main. The plate window of Paul’s Appliance Mart blew when the walls buckled and the second story fell into the cellar. The prescription file of City Drug was salvaged and moved to Public Drug where orders will be filled as per usual. A precautionary soaking of the Western Auto roof produced unusual water damage. Bozeman sent their biggest pumper and four firemen. Let’s hear it for Bozeman. “Livingston teens were helpful in ‘cleaning out’ City Drug,” the mayor said ambiguously. The
Livingston Enterprise
mentioned “raging inferno,” “firemen silhouetted against the flames,” a “sad day for all concerned” and various persons “bending over backwards.”

That, thought Payne, gazing at the wrack and ruin, is the burned-down block of my hopes, doused by the hook and ladders of real life. Some varmint signed me up for a bum trip. And, quite honestly, I don’t see why.

It looked like rain. Nevertheless, art had raised its head. Ann brought her books inside, field guides and novels; and stood the field glasses on the hall table. She took her camera
out of its case and mounted it on the aluminum tripod before pulling on her slicker and going outside again. She folded the tripod and carried the whole thing over her shoulder like a shovel and crossed the yard, climbed through the bottom two strands of wire and dodged manure all the way to the unirrigated high ground where the sage grew in fragrant stripes of blue. The lightning was shivering the sky and it scared her enough that she prudently avoided silhouetting herself on hill tops. When she finally set the camera up, she had no even ground and had to prop the tripod with stones. She checked frequently through the view finder until she felt she had it plumb and began composing. The view finder isolated a clear rectangle of country; three slightly overlapping and declining hills, quite distant; evening light spearing out from under dense cloud cover. The hills divided the frame in a single vibrant line; and though she thought there was something tiresome and Turneresque about the light spears, she liked the incandescence of the cottonwoods whose shapes gently spotted the sharp contours of hill. She had trained herself to previsualize all color into a gray scale so that she could control the photograph in black and white. It pleased her to see the scale here would be absolute. The white, searing lightning with its long penumbra of flash, graded across the viewed area to the pure black shadows in the draws and gullies. Ann felt this polarity of light with an almost physical apprehension; the lightning thrusts seemed palpable and hard. She turned the lens slightly out of focus to exaggerate the contours of the composition; then returned it to a razor edge. She held her breath as though shooting a rifle and kept her hand cradled under the lens, looking down at its pastel depth-of-field figures, the three aluminum legs opening from under
the camera like a star. A light perspiration broke out upon her upper lip as she pared away, focusing, selecting aperture and shutter speed toward the pure photographic acuity she perceived in her imagination. The lightning would have to be in it or the picture would be a silly postcard. But it was flashing irregularly and she never knew when it would appear. She wanted it distant and to the left of the lower end of the hills for decent compositional equipoise. As the storm, still distant, increased, the bolts of lightning appeared with greater regularity, a regularity Ann began to feel was rhythmical. She attempted to anticipate this rhythm so that she could trip the shutter at the suitable moment; at each plunge of lightning, at each searing streak, she tightened her muscles and gradually closed in on the interval until, after a dozen or more instances, she stood away from the camera with the cable release in her fingers and moved—very slightly—from head to toe. Her eyes were closed, it must be said. After some moments of this strenuous business, she opened her eyes, dazed, and tripped the shutter at the microsecond that the lightning shimmered, distant, over the lower end of hills. Black and white, diminishing grays were, she knew, stilled and beautiful across thirty-five millimeters of silver nitrate emulsion inside her little camera.

Ann panted there for some time before gathering the legs of the tripod and heading back down toward the ranch.