Nothing but Blue Skies (8 page)

He picked up his phone.

“Eileen.”

“Yes, Mr. Copenhaver.”

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“My mind was elsewhere.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you. Now, can you get me Lucy across the hall.”

The phone rang only once.

“Lucy, Frank.”

“Yes.”

“Is there something wrong?”

“Is there something wrong …” she said. He knew now, of course, that there was.

“I thought we’d had a nice evening.”

“We had, to a point.”

“And at what point did you think it went downhill?”

“At the point you called me Gracie.”

“I did that, did I?”

“About seven times.”

“Sorry.”

“I suppose it’s not your fault, Frank. But I’m not your old wife.”

“Of course not.”

He hung the phone up and leaned on his hands. He could have said, “No, you’re not my old wife. You’re my wife’s old friend. Some friend!”

For some reason, he called June up at the dealership. They had to page her on the lot. By the time she came to the phone, he had forgotten why it had seemed so necessary to call her. Nevertheless, he told her what had happened. She listened quietly. He explained
as discreetly as he could that he had said one or two inappropriate things during a spell of delightful lovemaking and it had ruined everything. June said, “I can’t get into it. When they’re doing their job, they can call me John Brown for all I care.” Frank thanked her anyway and hung up, then thanked her to himself for this burst of redneck health.

He went down to Lucy’s office and sat under the waterfall while Lucy watched him and waited for him to say something.

“Are you still angry?” he said finally.

“No. I never was angry.”

“I don’t want to lay this on you, but if you weren’t angry, you were hurt.”

“Then I was angry, but I’m not angry now.”

Some hours ago, he thought, she was chewing sheets and going “Oof, oof, oof!” while, evidently, I was going, “Oh, Gracie, oh, Gracie!” Quite a picture. Oh, dear.

Then she smiled and said, “This time, I’m not sending you anywhere.” The air had apparently cleared. Frank left her office, thinking, What a nice person.

Frank straightened up his desk and went back out through the reception area. “I’m going to the ranch,” he said.

“Can you be reached there?” asked Eileen.

“No, but I’ll be back.”

Frank drove north out of town, cutting through the subdivisions that lay around the old town center. Frank had a reluctant affection for these suburbs, with their repetitious shapes and lawns and basketball hoops and garages. He appreciated their regularity.

The road wound up through dryland farms of oats and malting barley, golden blankets in the middle of sagebrush country, toward the tall brown of snowy mountains. The city had almost disappeared behind him, yet from the front gate of the home place he could still make it out. A bright serration against the hills.

Frank stopped right in front of the house where his family once lived, a substantial farmhouse with a low, deep porch across the entire front, white with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof.
The house sat on a fieldstone cellar with deep-set airyway windows at regular intervals beneath the porch. The house was locked up. In front, the tall hollyhocks his grandmother had taken such care of stood up boldly through the quack grass and competed along the border of the porch with the ocher shafts of henbane. The junipers hadn’t been trimmed and streaks of brown penetrated their dark green masses. It was a fine old house that gave Frank the creeps.

He drove slowly past it toward the barn and outbuildings, looking for Boyd Jarrell, his hired man. He had already seen Jarrell’s truck from the house, and when he crossed the cattle guard into the equipment compound, he watched Jarrell walk past the granary without looking up at Frank’s car. He saw that Jarrell would be in a foul mood, and felt a slight sinking in his stomach. Boyd liked Mike but didn’t like Frank. Mike came out here and played rancher with Boyd, building fence on the weekends or irrigating, and in general dignifying Boyd’s job by doing an incompetent imitation of it. Frank could never understand why this would ingratiate Mike to Boyd, but he guessed it was a form of tribute.

Frank parked the car and walked toward the granary. Jarrell now crossed the compound going the other way, carrying an irrigating shovel and a length of tow chain over his shoulder.

“Boyd,” Frank called, and Jarrell stopped, paused and looked over at Frank. “Have you got a minute?”

“I might.”

Frank walked over to him.

“I spoke to Lowry Equipment on Friday,” said Frank, “and the loader’s fixed on the tractor. So, that’s ready to go whenever you need it.”

“If that’s all it was.”

“That’s right. But I assume it’s okay.”

Jarrell looked away and smiled. Frank let it fall silent for a minute.

“I’ve got a buyer to look at our calves on Monday.”

“I hope he can find them.”

Frank looked at Jarrell. Jarrell had him by fifty pounds and ten years. But he had put down his mark.

“He’ll find them,” Frank said. “You’ll take him to them. Or you’ll get out.”

Frank turned to go to his car.

“Fuck you, Copenhaver,” he heard Jarrrell say, like a concussion or a huge sneeze, and Frank kept walking. He heard Jarrell walk up behind him, and in a moment Frank’s hat was slapped off his head. He bent to pick it up, then kept going to his car. Jarrell laughed and went to his truck, parked alongside the barn.

Frank stopped, then turned. He went back to where Jarrell stood. “Why did you do that, Boyd?”

“Because I don’t like people telling me what to do.”

“Well, Boyd, you should have thought of that.”

“Thought of that when, you goddamn sonofabitch? When I let you tell me what to do?”

“When you came to work for us, Boyd. You knew what the deal was. I told you what the deal was. And I might have been the guy to give you your last chance.” Jarrell crossed his arms and smiled at a faraway place. “I wouldn’t hesitate to fire you right now except for the thought you might go back and beat up your wife like you did last time.” Jarrell swung his gaze from the cloudy faraway and stared hard and flat into Frank’s face. If it happens it happens, Frank thought. I couldn’t live with myself if I shut up now. “Don’t look at me, it was in the papers. And you know what? I had the same thought everybody else did: what kind of guy puts a hundred-ten-pound woman in the Deaconess Hospital? What kind of man is that? Good luck on your next job, Boyd.”

Frank turned and began to walk toward his car. He hadn’t gone many steps before he heard Jarrell behind him again. He kept walking and the steps ceased. He got in his car and drove out of the drive, past the unlucky house, and tried to picture the exact spot where Jarrell stood when he left.

When he got back to the office, he called Mrs. Jarrell and explained that he had had to let Boyd go, that Boyd was a fine man and a fine worker but that the time had come for each of
them to get on with their lives in a different way. He had had to tell people before that it was time to get on with their lives. He said this in a conciliatory voice that sounded, after a bit, like that of a radio announcer or an advertisement for a commercial halfway house for disturbed youths. Mrs. Jarrell at least let him finish, then called him every foul name he had ever heard, including a few he was unsure of, like “spastic morphodite.” Frank squinted in pain through this barrage and said that, nevertheless, he wished them all the luck in the world. His voice was a croak.

“Eat shit,” said Mrs. Jarrell. “I hope you have a stroke.”

Pause for thought. Some direct suggestions from Mrs. Jarrell. The same day Hell was suggested as a travel destination — and by a lover of the previous night! He went to see his brother Mike.

Mike was an orthodontist, and Frank had to wait until almost noon in his office, with bucktoothed preteens, reading kids’ magazines before Mike had him in. They sat in the dental lab and talked, fat Mike still in his pale green smock, his round red face revealing the constant optimism that came of doing some one small thing in the world, namely pushing young teeth back and keeping them there. Frank looked around at the instruments, at the remarkable order.

“Mike,” said Frank, “the ranch is making me crazy.”

“You always tell me this when irrigation starts.”

“I fired that cocksucker Jarrell.”

“I wish you hadn’t done that. He’s a hard worker.”

“I went out there today and he was in one of his cowboy snits.”

“You shouldn’t have gone out there. You know this happens when irrigation water runs. Everybody becomes an animal.”

“I have to go out there. I had the tractor fixed for the filthy shit. He busted it, bent the bucket and blew the hydraulics. But he can’t talk to anyone so I got it fixed. I tell him this and it just seems to make him madder. I told him we had to have the buyer look at the calves. This makes him mad. He knocks my hat off, salutes me with a ‘fuck you.’ It’s unbearable, the cowboy mentality. I don’t want to hire any more cowboys. They’re all like Jarrell — drunken, wife-beating, snoose-chewing geeks with big
belt buckles and catfish mustaches. They spend all their time reading magazines about themselves. College professors drive out and tell them they’re a dying breed. I hate them. I tried to make things right with his wife so he doesn’t put her in Deaconess again. What’d ya think she said to me?”

“Another ‘fuck you’?”

“No, you’re close. She said, ‘Eat shit.’ And she called me a ‘spastic morphodite.’ Ever hear that one before?”

“I have to admit, that’s a new one on me.”

“This would be a half-man, half-woman and very uncoordinated.”

“Huh, real circus stuff.”

“Yeah. And I don’t want anymore. I’m a businessman, an ordinary businessman, and I want to keep it that way.”

“Why don’t you sell it? I really don’t care, Frank. Marny would like a place we could take the kids picnicking when they get older, but there’ll always be somewhere we can go.”

“I’m going to get it out of my life whether we sell it or not. I would sell it, but I’m a sentimental asshole and it’s ruining my life. I can’t put anything behind me. I’m an asshole. I’m an asshole.”

“I agree with your evaluation,” Mike said.

“We never lived there, for God sakes.”

“Yeah, but Dad grew up there.”

“He hated it, Mom hated it.”

“It doesn’t matter. That was long ago. Now it’s the ‘old home place,’ Frank. I don’t know why you keep applying these truth tests. It doesn’t matter what really happened. It only matters what people think is true, and Mom and Dad thought they spent the happiest years of their life there. It’s true they argued for thirty years, but I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t an old folks’ home. It had that much going for it.”

Frank didn’t want this to be the last word, but nothing came to him and he had to let it stand.

The Fourth of July. Few people knew the country had not always been an independent nation. Most citizens took it as a day in honor of the invention of the firecracker, and towns like Deadrock bloomed with smoke and noise and pastel streamers of light on the evening sky. This year, what no one expected was that the hundreds of Indians who lived away from their reservations, on small plots or in tenements or in streets and alleys, would march on this quiet city with its sturdy buildings, broad central avenue and flowery neighborhoods, and ask for their land back. It ruined the Fourth of July. Indian ragamuffins, crones, wolfish men, pregnant women, fancy dancers and boys dressed as prairie chickens carried hand-lettered signs or simply chanted, “You know it’s not yours, give it back!” Finally, the police frightened them off with flashing lights and uniformed appearances. The Indians dispersed. Some were seen at their jobs in town the next day. Like a dream without an obvious explanation, the event went unmentioned. It was pushed out of the newspapers by perestroika.

As soon as the bank opened after the holiday, Frank went to the drive-through window for some cash. Whenever he felt bleak, and for whatever reason, he always made sure he had cash. The teller looked at him from a high window and talked to him over a loudspeaker next to the vacuum delivery box. He sent his check
up to her in a tube, and when she looked at it, she asked him if he had a dog. He’d had, in fact, a beautiful border collie named Scott, but Boyd Jarrell’s predecessor, a little Oklahoma cowboy with a huge ring of keys on his belt, ran over Scott trying to drive and light a cigarette at the same time. When Frank asked him how he had run over his dog, the Oklahoman said, “Dog ain’t got no business under a tire.” Frank brought Scott’s body into town and buried him next to the raspberry canes behind the house, and felt very sad for a long time. He still felt sad. So he said to the teller, “Yes, I have a dog, a beautiful border collie named Scott, black, brown and white.” When the teller sent Frank’s money, she also sent a package of dog biscuits down through the vacuum tube.

“What’s your name?” Frank said with moistening eyes. He couldn’t see her, far off in her high window.

“Joanie.”

“Thank you, Joanie.”

He now felt closer to Joanie than to any other woman in his life. When he got to the office, clutching his dog biscuits, he retreated into his room and rang out to Eileen. “Eileen, get Joanie at Security Merchant on the line.”

“Joanie,” he said breezily, “this is Frank Copenhaver. Uh, to refresh your memory, I cashed a check for a hundred bucks and you were kind enough to send down some little sort of cookies for my dog Scott, a tricolored border collie.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, I wonder if you would like to uh” — blank, his mind went blank, then filled back in vaguely — “to meet Scott.”

“If I would like to meet Scott?”

“Yes, meet Scott.”

“The dog?”

“Yes.”

“If I would like to meet your dog?”

“Yes, that is what I am saying.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Copenhaver, if I would or not.”

“Think of the dog as a device. I’m saying I’d like to meet you. I’m quite safe, quite reliable, an old customer of the bank, endless
paper trail and so on. Well, what do you say?” He was conscious of yammering.