Nothing but Blue Skies (32 page)

“She did, didn’t she.”

“She sure did.”

“Well, I’d sure like to see her.”

“Just stop at the house. That’s why I came by. I wanted you to know where you could find us.”

“Where’s the house?”

“One Twenty-one Third.”

“Let me think about it first. But maybe I’ll stop over.”

“Nice place,” said Edward. He lifted his hand toward Frank’s house, let it fall.

Frank wondered why he had bothered. “You want to buy it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That was sort of part of the fantasy at one time, that house.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Edward.

“I thought maybe it would be better if you and Gracie had it —”

“It’s best if you see her.”

“— than if I go on rattling around in it. I’d be happier in a hotel, frankly.”

“I thought you owned a hotel.”

“Yeah, but it’s for chickens.”

Edward gave him a puzzled look, then reminded Frank that he ought to speak to Gracie. Edward turned to go to his Saab. Frank could see that it was hard to know how to make the proper exit, and in fact, he himself turned fairly woodenly to go to his house. He heard the little aircraft whir of Edward’s car, got the mail from his mailbox and went inside.

He put a Lean Cuisine in the microwave and turned it on. He switched on the radio, always set on the oldies station, and found, to his satisfaction, a Youngbloods retrospective in progress. The crooner Jesse Colin Young seemed to speak directly to him from the darkness while he opened his mail. What’s this? Eastman
Kodak was going to buy the rest of Amerilite Diagnostics Ltd.? I didn’t even fucking see that coming! Weren’t these the pukes that said, ‘Keep it simple, stupid’? Frank hated the sense that if he took his eyes off these birds for so much as a day, they pulled something on him.

The phone rang.

“Mr. Copenhaver?”

“Yes?”

“This is Gladys Pankov from the city planning office. I also represent the Preservation League in my capacity as planner and secretary.”

“Right?”

“I was wondering — is this possible? — if you could clarify something for me about the Kid Royale Hotel. We had hoped that some program for its restoration were in place. But we’ve just received the oddest notice at the planning office.”

“Okay, now I’m with you. My mind was elsewhere. Kodak is on some kind of acquisitions tear. Now, yeah, okay, uh … no, that’s no longer the plan.”

“It’s not?”

Frank thought he knew what was coming. “Are you calling to tell me that exciting new grants are now available for this kind of work?”

“No, actually, I was running down a rumor.”

“It’s going to be a chicken ranch,” said Frank sharply.

“Yes, that was it. Well, just a couple of questions, then. Did you know that one of the rooms was the suite of William Tecumseh Sherman?”

“Sure, the guy that killed all the Indians. That’s a big room all right, hold a lot of chickens.”

“Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill stayed there, George Armstrong Custer, three of the original Vigilantes —”

“If I’m not mistaken,” Frank interrupted, “they’re all dead. So, there’s plenty of room for the chickens. Look, I hate to be short with you, but I’m nuking a cannelloni.” He got off the phone and felt his scalp. He thought about Gracie. It would be tempting to
rage against women. Endless destruction around the world. Back to Helen, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth. Mad scientists. He investigated his paper. Poinsettia white flies devastate two agricultural counties in California. Is it men who are so crazy about poinsettias that they want to mail them to friends in California? Blaming the victims? The victims are lovely California vegetables with lethal bugs lodged in their vitals. They and their consumers, people from — one of Frank’s favorite phrases — all walks of life.

That night when he lay down, instead of thinking about his loneliness or $$nence of certain foreclosures, he thought about the gap between short-term and long-term interest rates, the yields on two-year Treasury notes. Frank Copenhaver was sinking into a chicken-driven destiny. If he could just get back on his feet, he was going wide open into biotech firms. Their names helped him drift off: Regeneron, MedImmune, Genentech, Alkermes, Glycomed, Isis …

Mike was there at daybreak. He brought Frank his paper and some breakfast from Hardee’s in a nice white bag with a hot slick spot on its side. Frank was still in the shower, letting the hot water stream against the stiff back of his neck while he made several plans for the day. He could see out the window the swimming shapes of cars in the street, and when he finished his shower, he rubbed a small circle in the steam and looked below the house to see who was parked there. It was Mike’s Country Squire. For some reason, looking out over the town from this perspective, he thought how much more interesting it would be if they were involved in a war here — tanks in the streets, partisans lobbing grenades into cellars or, best of all, the lust to wipe everything out and start over again. This need for a war was pretty basic, he suspected. His lousy little town had never had one. The closest it had come to a siege of Vicksburg were a few slapping matches around election time.

So, Mike was here. Mike had never taken a big chance and he would never take a big fall, but he had his virtues. He was a deeply loyal person, blindly loyal, a beautiful trait in a country whose salad bars sold lettuce by weight, a country whose true spiritual leader was Benedict Arnold. Frank could never get in a schoolyard fight when Mike was around; because if he should lose, Mike, big
and fat and strong already, would jump on the victor and pound him to a pulp. At another time, Frank would have to have the fight all over again, this time collapsing under the blows of a deeply indignant adversary. Mike was straight and clear regarding Gracie. It was part of having an opinion about everything, and every opinion a function of team spirit. He was a Copenhaver and she was a treacherous flooze.

By the time Frank got downstairs, Mike had made bacon and eggs to go with the stuff from Hardee’s and had put everything on the table. He was feeding himself with one hand and holding an open hand to the chair opposite him for Frank to sit down.

Frank sat. “My teeth are fine,” he said. “I’m sure that’s why you’re here.”

Mike gave him a mirthless grin as if to say, “Very funny, Frank.” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin.

“They’re a little sensitive to cold, but that’s not so unusual.”

“Frank —”

“I had that onslaught of cavities spring before last, and a little gum recession.”

“Frank —”

“You let that flossing go for one day and it might be a long time before you get back to it. Then what do you have? Bleeding, sore gums, the prospects of —”

“Frank, please stuff something in your fucking mouth.” Silence from Frank. “Thank you. Now, didn’t I make you a nice breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t I a nice brother, with your well-being always in mind as a fellow Copenhaver?”

“Yes, you are, Mike. And I have come to accept your dogged conservatism as a desire to build a world on the basis of those models we once shared together: Lego, Lincoln Logs and the immortal Erector Set.”

“You’ve lost none of your acid wit, I see,” said Mike. “The acid may be rising in proportion to the wit, but it’s still pretty much all there.”

“I appreciate that. Compliments haven’t been showering of late.”

“It’s really no wonder. It’s hard for people to look on at an innovative businessman who abruptly decides to commit economic suicide.”

“Are you referring to risk management here?” asked Frank.

“I’m referring to the talk of the town.”

“You haven’t seen how it’s going to turn out.”

“How’s it going to turn out, Frank?”

“A chicken in every pot, for one thing.”

“Yeah, I just heard about that one. Frank, do you realize I love you?”

“Thank you, Mike.”

“It occurred to me that perhaps you have concluded no one loves you.”

“I suppose I had had that thought, Mike,” said Frank. “But thank you for loving me.”

“You know, just because some opportunistic whore sees a brighter light over somebody else’s driveway doesn’t mean you have to give up on having a coherent life.”

“Mike, please.”

“And think about your beautiful Holly.”

“I do. But that’s not simple either. You know she’s been seeing Lane Lawlor.”

“I knew that. But so what? She’ll come around.”

“I hope so. And so will I. Yes, my boy. Rest your little head. I’ll come out of this thing in a blizzard of deposit slips.”

“Frank —”

“I know.”

“Frank —”

“I know, I’m doing what I can. There’s a slight fog over the target, sure to clear.”

“You can always slip out to the ranch. It’s an easy commute. Might help to hear some birds.”

“This is handier. I can walk downtown.”

“But Frank,” said Mike, his face clouding. “At the rate you’re going, you’ll be lucky to hang on to your house.”

Frank hadn’t heard that before. He went on wiping up the yolk with a wedge of toast. He thought he brought real insouciance to this moment. Take my house?

“Whatever blows their hair back, Mike. Some of these things are like weather. You just have to watch Willard and wait for another system.”

“All I want you to know is, I’m down there among those guys, the bank, whatever. I’m doing what I can to slow the process. But what you have to do, Frank, is to try to have a change of attitude.”

“Okay.”

“And remember I love you.”

“Okay.”

Mike left and went to work. Frank wasn’t thinking about anything but speaking to Gracie. He imagined it’d go something like this: “Hi, Gracie, good to see you again. No, no, no, I don’t think we should do
that
. I think we should build up to
that
, if indeed we do
that
at all. Without question, you would like a reprise of my activities, my accelerated life story,
post
your departure but
pre
my, how shall I say, decline? You look pretty much the same, how do I look? I suppose there’s been water over the dam but that won’t prevent our talking. Is this your lawyer? I don’t mind if he’s here, he looks pretty stupid, some of this will be too much for him to absorb. You see, Gracie, I’ve had a failure of faith at some level. That pyramid called America, of which I was but a small stone, has inverted and is now resting on its point. As you see (you took physics), this makes for a wobblier arrangement than the one we grew up with, with the big part on the bottom.”

He was now making an extraordinarily close examination of himself in the mirror: hairline, pores, teeth. He reminded himself not to compress his lips, which produced the effect of widening his face in a kind of, in a kind of … well, it was unattractive. He wasn’t going to work, he decided; he would do this first. So what
was he thinking, putting on these drab clothes, this I-am-sincere hopsacking blazer? Women don’t want sincerity or any other foursquare merits. They want to look at a man and say, This animal is about to spring on me like a Bengal tiger, ease that big lever till it seats. With that stupid hopsacking sport coat she would assume he was about to fuck the lawyer or the lamp but not her in his vapid sincerity getup. Officer, he rolled in here doing sixty, and before you could say Jack Robinson, had his dick crosswired in the reading lamp. Do take him off, I’m trying to watch the news.

Frank sort of came to, still standing in front of the mirror. Slow down, hoss, he said to himself, whoa-up now, big fella. He put on his jeans and old cowboy boots and his nicest green sweater. He headed for 121 Third Street.

Third Street. A quiet neighborhood. The yards were orderly but not so well kept that plastic toy parts looked out of place. The lawns blossomed each year with campaign signs of one kind or another, from U.S. president to local county commissioners. Flats of petunias from local nurseries lined most entryways and, in warm weather, the smell of outdoor cooking reached the sidewalk.

Frank passed a young man playing his guitar and singing on a wooden porch. A mongrel bounced to a white fence alongside the sidewalk barking hoarsely, as though each time it landed on the ground the impact drove the barks from its lungs. Frank didn’t react and the dog gave it up as a bad job. An old Dodge rested on flat tires alongside the curb. Its hood was up and two teenage boys rested on their elbows and chests underneath it, contemplating the engine with such absorption that neither felt the need to speak. When Frank was a boy he wanted a car so much, he tried to study how they worked. He memorized the four-cycle engine — intake, compression, power and exhaust — so that if he ever got a car, he would know how to operate it. What could recommend itself better to a pubescent youngster than a rolling love nest with its own music system? It explained the dreamy glaze of teenage drivers.

Now he was nervous. He was only a few houses away. In fact, there was the Saab. He stood in front of an English-style cottage with tall trellises covered with honeysuckle on either side of a narrow porch. Frank tried to understand exactly what he was doing here. He tried to remember who used to live here. He thought it was a piano teacher. He hesitated, and would have retreated if he had been sure he was unseen. Then Edward Ballantine came to the door and said, “Ah, I thought you might still come. Good.” Gracie appeared behind him. Frank couldn’t see her face well enough to glimpse her thoughts. “I think I’ll just ease on,” said Edward. “I really ought to be out of the way.” He went out the door and, fixing Frank with a determined beam, down to the sidewalk. “Make the most of your visit,” he called back. “It’s for everyone’s good.”

Finally, Frank stood in front of Gracie in the doorway. The Saab went off with its airplane noise. Frank felt a little unsteady. He wished he’d brought something. Flowers would have been a laugh all right, but it would have been nice to do that anyway, nice and impossible.

“Hi, Grace.”

“Hello, Frank.” He must have looked blank because her face broke into a smile and she added, “Hi, I’m Gracie.”

He felt a panicky numbness. He had not expected this and didn’t feel he could be sure of anything he said. Gracie was wearing a pink cable-knit cardigan over her shoulders and her hands were clasped in front of her. She had her hair up and it emphasized the good way the years had firmed her face into a small strength. Her eyes were brown and deep-set, and there were times when she looked a bit Indian.