Nothing but Blue Skies (2 page)

Frank buried himself not in his work but in fantasies of escape. He became a connoisseur of maps. He loved the history of maps and he felt drawn to the theory of the flat earth as the only one that adequately explained the disappearances common to everyone, especially death. He saw a kind of poetry in the spherical projections of the world as devised by Ptolemy. The more insistently the mystery of Gracie’s changed patterns intruded upon his thoughts, the more interested he was in the shrinking
terrae incognitae
of the old world; flat or round, what was the difference? Really, he often thought, what is the damn difference? It just seems likely that my parents, like other generations, milled around for sixty-eighty years and fell off the end.

He bought a scale model of a nineteenth-century surveyor’s carriage and had booked a trip with Gracie’s travel agent friend, Lucy, to visit the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, home of the Greenwich meridian, about the time Gracie hit the road without a
map of any kind. By this time, the impending change had elaborated into a full-fledged human by the name of Edward Ballantine, a traveler and breeder of race horses, a resident of Sedona, Arizona, spiritual headquarters for Shirley MacLaine’s crystal people. Suddenly, Galileo’s discovery of the satellites of Jupiter, Newton’s announcement that the earth was flattened at the poles, even his simple pleasure at reading the mileage tables in his gas station, were out the window. He had never really thought about his wife leaving him. She was gone and he would never be the same again. He would never have a single second of time that was in any way continuous with his previous life, even if she came back, which was not likely. What good was his map collection now?

In 1968, a now ancient time full of scathing situations, trying love but preferring lust and, for many, one meretricious
scène à faire
, the flushing of narcotics down the toilet, Frank was banished from the family business by his father. This involved a long autobiographical recitation in which his father told about his early years on the ranch, the formulaic (in Frank’s eyes) long walk to a poorly heated country school, the pain of being Catholic in a community of Norwegian Lutherans, the early success in getting calf weights up, the malt barley successes, the highest certifications and the prize ribbons, the sod farm successes, the nursery, the Ford dealership, the implement dealership and the four apartment buildings, including the one regularly demolished by the fraternity boys “and their concubines.” Frank’s father was a self-taught, almost bookish individual, and he wore his education on his sleeve.

Among the fraternity boys was Frank, the son of the landlord, who had graduated a year earlier but who was now “managing the building” for his family, hoping to make it another of the family’s successes. The occasion of his banishment was a theme party, the theme being Farm Life, a kind of witticism on Frank’s part involving hauling three tons of straw into the building and piling it higher than not only the furniture but the heads of the occupants. Barnyard animals, chiefly pigs, were turned loose in
this lightless wilderness and the party began. It lasted two days. Tunnels quickly formed that led to the beer kegs and to small clearings where people could gather. There was a proscribed area for bodily functions, a circular clearing in the hay with dove gray shag carpet for a floor, and another for the operations of the stereo and its seemingly endless loop of the beloved Neil Young’s “Are you ready for the country, ’cause it’s time to go!”

The world of straw became damp and odorous with beer, marijuana, sperm, perfume and pig droppings. Frank would remember ever afterward the terror of crawling stoned, in his underwear, down a small side tunnel to meet headlong in the semi-darkness a bristling, frightened three-hundred-pound pig. Right after that, clutching a beer and a joint and hearing the approach of another pig, he withdrew into the straw alongside the tunnel to let the pig pass, watched it go by ridden by the most beautiful naked sorority girl he had ever seen, Janet Otergaard from Wolf Point, now vice president of the First National Bank. Frank crawled after her but fell behind a bit, and when he caught up she was already going off into the straw with Barry Danzig, who was home from Northwestern Law School. This disappointment had the effect of making Frank long for fresh air. He made his way toward the entrance, and crawling out of the straw in his underwear, a bleak and tarry roach hanging from one of his slack lips, he met his father.

Mr. Copenhaver continued to wear suspenders long after they had gone out of fashion. He wore wide ones with conspicuous brass hardware to remind people of his agricultural origins. Most people hadn’t gotten the news that farmers were as liable to be envy-driven crooks as anybody else, the stream of information having been interrupted by the Civil War; so, wearing wide suspenders was like wearing an “I Am Sincere” sign. Today, curving over the powerful chest of his father, they stood for all the nonsense he was not brooking. A bleary girl in a straw-flecked blue sweater emerged pulling the sweater down at the sides over her bare hips. She peered unwelcomingly at Frank’s father and said, “Who’s this one?”

“The owner of the building!” boomed Mr. Copenhaver. She dove back into the straw. Frank was now overpowered by fear of his father. He felt his drugged and drunken vagueness in muzzy contrast to his father’s forceful clarity next to him, a presence formed by a lifetime of unstinting forward movement, of farming, warfare and free-market capitalism as found in a small Montana city. Next to his father, Frank felt like a pudding. As against making a world, he was prepared to offer the quest for pussy and altered states — an edgeless generation, dedicated to escaping the self and inconsequential fornicating, dedicated to the idea of the Relationship and all-terrain shoes that didn’t lie to your feet. Frank’s fear was that his father would strike him. Worse, he said to get the people out, clean up the building and appear at his office in the morning.

That didn’t start out well either. He was exhausted from cleaning up the mess himself. His companions were unwilling to help until they had had a night’s sleep. He found himself shouting, on the verge of tears: “Is this friendship? You know my back is against the wall? I’m about to get my ass handed to me. I need you to help me!” We need sleep, they said. So, he cleaned the mess up himself, hauling twenty-seven loads in the back of his car out to the landfill and simply, hopelessly, releasing the pigs into the neighborhood. They belonged to the family of one of the fellows who hadn’t stayed to help. Frank found the most awful things on the floor: false teeth taped to the end of a stick, hot dogs and half-finished bags of miniature doughnuts dusted with powdered sugar, rotten panties, a Bible, a catcher’s chest protector. He showered, changed into a clean shirt, clean jeans and a corduroy sport jacket. Then, having been up all night, he headed for his father’s office. He drove up Assiniboine Avenue and then turned at College Street. His nerves were shattered by the sight of three of the pigs jogging up the center of Third Street, loosely glancing over their shoulders. Here and there, people stopped to watch these out-of-place animals.

He parked his car, an old blue Mercury with sarcastic tail fins and speckled bumpers, in front of his father’s office, a handsomely
remodeled farmhouse on West Deadrock, and went in. He presented himself shakily to the secretary, the very Eileen who now worked for him, who waved him on with a gesture that suggested she knew all about people like Frank and his friends. And perhaps she did, he thought. It’s easy to detect motion when you’re frozen in position, an old hunter’s trick.

“Come in, Frank,” said his father evenly.

“Hi, Dad.”

His father stayed at his desk while Frank sank subdued into an upholstered chair placed in front of the desk, a chair so ill sprung that Frank, at six-one, was barely able to see over the front of his father’s desk. The view of his father’s head and neck rising from the horizontal line in front was reminiscent of a poorly lit documentary shot of a sea serpent and added to the state begun by Frank’s shattered condition.

Mr. Copenhaver made a steeple with his fingertips. The high color in his cheeks, the silver-and-sand hair combed straight across his forehead and the blue suit gave him an ecclesiastical look, and Frank felt a fleeting hope that this was no accident and Christian forgiveness lay just around the corner.

“Frank, you’re interested in so many things.” His father glanced down; Frank could see he had the desk drawer slightly open so that he could make out some notes he had made for this conversation.

“Yes, sir.”

“You like to hunt and fish.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You like the ladies. You like a high old time. You like to meet your buddies for a drink in the evening and you read our daily newspaper, indicating, I might have hoped, an interest in current events but probably only the ball scores. I rarely see you with anything uplifting in your hand bookwise and the few you’ve left around the place are the absolute utmost in prurience, illustrated with photographs for those who are unable to follow the very descriptive text. So far so good: at least it was confined between the covers of a book. There was a day in time when I had my own Tillie the Toiler comics and I am not here setting myself up to
moralize about your condition. I have for a long time now, heaving a great sigh, accepted that I was the father of a drunken sports lecher and let it go at that. But when I gave you the opportunity to find some footing in the day-to-day world that would have implications for your livelihood many years down the road, you gave it the kind of disrespect I have to assume was directed at me. Last night, I felt personally smothered in straw and pig manure. That was your valentine to your father, Frank, thank you. And Frank, see how this flies: I’m not going to put up with it anymore. You’re not going to run that building anymore and my hope that you would one day manage the old home place is dead. I think your brother Mike is the man for that job.”

Mr. Copenhaver tipped back in his chair and began to talk about growing up on the old home place, the long walk to school, the cold, some parenthetical remarks about rural electrification and rural values. Frank tried to stare out the window but his eyes were too weak to get past the glass. He was cottonmouthed with exhaustion and prepared to endorse any negative view of his character. At the same time, he’d had enough. He got to his feet on his leaden legs and raised his hand, palm outward, to his father.

“Goodbye,” Frank said. He went out the door and rarely saw his father again. Mike saw him frequently, even driving down from the school of dentistry. They had a nice, even relationship that Frank envied. Mike never made an attempt to be a businessman like his father. That, much later, would be Frank’s job, seeking approval from someone who had departed this world for the refrigerated shadows of death.

First he went to Seattle, where he worked for a short time tying up seaplanes at Lake Union. Coming from a land of little rain, he felt his clothes would never dry. He lived with a Quinault Indian his own age who was studying marine biology at the University of Washington and who wanted to go home and manage the salmon fisheries on his reservation. Frank kept tying up the planes and admiring the pilots and waiting for the weather to clear. It never did. So, he went to Los Angeles and worked as a framer on what was to be the biggest semi-enclosed air-conditioned seaside synagogue west of the Mississippi, but the funding went tits up and Frank was again unemployed, living in a pleasant rented room one block off Westwood and going to lavish previews of off-the-wall motion pictures made by other hippies.

He had various girlfriends, ones who cooked, ones who didn’t, ones who got on top and watched traffic at the same time, ones who passed a joint and held their breath while humping like a wild dog, flat-chested ones and ones whose breasts surged halfway to their belly buttons before trying to jump over their shoulders, ones who dealt, ones who typed screenplays for fake hippies from New York, ones who delivered singing telegrams and ones who sold airline tickets or served in-flight snacks and ones who like Frank himself were willing to support his weight but really
just wanted to go back where they came from. It was sex en masse. It got monotonous and lasted one year, one month and nineteen days. He was out of there like a kerosened cat. He wanted to go back where he came from but he still couldn’t quite bring it off. Everyone in California seemed surrounded by quotation marks.

He answered an ad promising travel and went to work for a crew that drifted around the country wrecking old homes and hauling the doors, chandeliers, windows and hardware back to Los Angeles for use in houses that duplicated other periods. They even demolished a few mansions in Montana. Frank thought of getting home but the brute work of making sure the booty made it to the West Coast was all-consuming. He would have liked a shot at the old home place but it was too much to ask. The old home places of others would have to do. The billiard table of a Butte mining baron ended up as a striking salad bar in Van Nuys, and numerous farm wagons and buckboards met a similar fate in steak joints, shrimp joints, king crab joints. Frank had felt a subtle change of character as he took on the world of atmosphere, as a thing unto itself. It was like the covering of straw and pig manure of the Farm Life party that had put him on the road in the first place. It was interesting to try to produce atmosphere directly, without tediously waiting for human life to create it.

Frank rose up in this work and became an independent contractor. His work had a look. If a chili chain wanted ambience, Frank went to the border and returned with wetback cafés loaded on tractor-trailer rigs. By the time the Cajun mania hit, Frank already was deep into Louisiana and in fact had inventoried the lower Mississippi, all the way to Plaquemines Parish, for an earlier gumbo empire that had stretched from Ventura to Redding before falling of its own weight and turning back into gas stations. It was in the minute town of Chalou, Louisiana, on the crumbling riverbend steps of a fallen-down indigo plantation house, that he met Gracie. She looked a little bit like an Indian. She was brown-eyed, black-haired, five-four and carried a two-barreled shotgun with big mule-ear hammers and a white ivory
bead for a sight and had some connection with the building. He knew right then he had totaled his last heirloom. Ever afterward he would marvel at his own solitary experience with love at first sight. He stood there under her gun, as he would later be under the gun of her departure and then absence. His diagnosis, after she’d gone, was that he had spent their time together building something to please his parents when he should have been building something to please Gracie.