Nothing but Blue Skies (29 page)

Instead of just wading out of the mud, Lucy kept trying to jump feet first like an immobilized kangaroo. Frank crawled toward her, determined to help. Lucy opened her mouth and began to howl like a forlorn dog. Frank kept saying, “I don’t blame you, I don’t blame you. How could I have done this to you?” She was flinging something at him, probably just more mud. Mud didn’t matter now. No matter how much of it, it was just theoretical. He well knew that he was stinking drunk, but he lacked any desire to resist its worst effects. He wished to be free of all conflict.

Dry ground was only a couple of yards off and soon they were standing on it, kicking out first one foot, then the other, like old-timers recalling their days in the chorus line. Frank smiled
broadly and pointed to the west. “Town is that way. And what a lovely night for a walk!” With a look of despair, Lucy trudged in the direction he was pointing, on the small marginal road that went off into the woods. There was a ribbon of stars overhead and Frank was hoping that his head would begin to clear. He took Lucy’s hand in his own and she sort of threw it off. He let it flop on his hip as though he weren’t doing anything with it anyway.

It wasn’t long before they came to a clearing where several pieces of heavy equipment were parked, including a big articulated log skidder. Frank stopped and looked at it for a long moment. He knew the answer to his troubles lay in technology.

“Lucy, if I can get that thing started, I can get our truck out of the mud in a heartbeat.”

“Forget it.”

“And accept defeat? Not this boy.”

With the skills of his youth, Frank lay upside down under the dashboard of the skidder and cut the ignition wires with his pocketknife. Touching them together, he felt the diesel lurch. He sat up, pushed in the fuel cut-off, set the throttle, crawled underneath again and hot-wired it. The diesel chugged steady, caught and ran. The hinged cap on the exhaust stack fluttered with pressure and neat puffs of smoke arose and disappeared against the starlight. He twisted the wires apart and let them hang.

“Climb aboard,” Frank called. Lucy considered it, then struggled up beside him. They were far from the ground. The skidder seemed as big as a locomotive, with a powerful hydraulic forklift in front of it. When Frank put it in gear, steering by hitting first one wheel brake and then the other, the great machine crawled forward on a serpentine course, flattening everything in its way. Lucy seemed almost fascinated, though she must have known things were out of control. And Frank had fixed upon the bogged-down pickup truck as an emblem of everything preventing him going on with his life.

He got the skidder turning off one way and couldn’t quite get it back on line until a blizzard of saplings went down before them, leaving the air filled with the rupture of small trunks and descending
clouds of leaves. This grand machine made its own road, and with their seats high above the destruction, they could feel some of the detached power that intoxicates those at war with the earth. They were back on their road and could make out the strip of sky overhead, which was a better navigation tool than the dark road ahead of them.

“Where do you suppose those fellows are?” Lucy asked over the engine noise.

“Long gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“They’re back in town by now.”

“To do what? Get the sheriff?”

Frank felt a shiver go through himself. He didn’t want to think about implications. He still had a wonderful feeling of living in his own dream. Everything seemed loose and guileless and free. He thought about the rumble of the big diesel going up through Lucy’s butt, making her a real part of his assault on reason.

“Sunup can’t be that far away,” said Lucy.

“Oh, don’t say it,” he said, looking back to see if the long yellow shape of the skidder was following him, under control. I’m unbelievably good at this, he thought. He felt he made a handsome picture atop this ten-ton machine, throwing shadows of its combustion through his companion’s interior.

He had a plan beyond simply keeping up appearances. He would ease the skidder up to the truck, place the forks underneath it, hydraulically lift the truck back onto the road and drive quietly back to town. He thought about explaining it to Lucy but realized she might not care. She was watching to see how this would turn out. To Frank, she had the detached clarity of real despair. She was a goner. Her head bobbed with the movement of the lurching machine. Her mouth hung open.

He found the truck again without any trouble. He had to turn off the road to get sideways to it. The skidder crawled down off the crown like a big weasel. By flattening a wide swath of brush, Frank was able to get perpendicular to the pickup. He stopped a moment to experiment with the forklift. It was simple: a hydraulic
valve lever raised and lowered it smoothly and powerfully. Now he eased forward to the truck. The forks were almost on a correct line to go underneath it, but the muddy bank stopped him several feet short. He backed up and tried it again. This time he might have been even shorter. Once more, and the same result: there was a slick berm that wouldn’t let him crawl up next to the truck.

He was going to have to use some power. He backed up and revved the diesel. “What are you going to do?” asked Lucy sharply over the roar of the engine. Frank engaged the gearbox and they leapt forward, up over the berm, and speared the truck with the steel forks. “Oh, no,” Frank said. He took it out of gear. The forks were buried clear to the hilt in the lower part of the door. He was sure some lever would get him out of this. He yanked back on the hydraulics and the truck began to rise, streaming mud and water from its undercarriage. Lucy let out a noise of despair as it lifted over them. By the time the skidder stopped lifting the truck, it was possible to see the chassis, the muffler and exhaust pipe. Lucy was still letting out an awful noise.

“This baby could end up in our laps,” Frank explained. He had to change the emphasis fast. He knelt on the floorboards and thrust his head up under Lucy’s dress. This usually gets them, he thought, and buried his face in her crotch. It was pure magic. Her dress seemed to light up around him. He could make out its flower pattern in a thrilling illumination. He could hear her voice, “Frank! Frank! Frank!” and felt her fingernails dig into his scalp. She wasn’t enjoying this. The thrashing got worse. Better have a look. He sat back on his haunches and threw the dress back over his head.

They had him in their high beams, Sheriff Hykema, Darryl and Darryl’s friend from the bar. Frank looked around like a blind possum, trying to process all this information. Lucy was pushing her dress between her knees as she sat on the tractor seat of the skidder. High overhead, Darryl’s pickup dropped clods of watery mud onto the engine-heated hood of the skidder. Frank stood slowly, held his hands up and surrendered.

It wasn’t until they reached town at sunrise, in all its harrowing
colors, that Frank realized that Lucy too would be booked and jailed. Darryl followed them to town in his truck, which they had carried to dry ground with the skidder. When they reached the courthouse, Frank immediately began to bargain with Darryl. He would like to have kept this secret from the bland and somehow alarming sheriff, but it wasn’t possible. Darryl didn’t want to speak to him at all. Frank knew he’d have to go quickly to a viable offer. They wouldn’t even have had this moment if the sheriff had realized that a bargain was in the offing.

They were sitting in a room where Frank remembered taking a written test for his driver’s license. There was still an eye chart on the wall.

“Darryl, there’s no sense in my apologizing. Things just got away from us there, a man-versus-machine deal fueled by alcohol. I see this doesn’t strike you as funny. But … how many miles your outfit got on it?”

“Sixty-one thou.”

“You do take good care of it.”

“I
did
.”

Frank saw that he was touching a deep issue here. “Well, look here. Can’t I just take your truck and buy you a new one?”

Darryl looked over, right into his eyes. Welcome to the twilight world of prostitution yawning before you, thought Frank.

“New?”

“New.”

“And what do I have to do?”

“Drop the charges, hoss.” Frank could see the clenched motion in the sheriff’s shoulders from his seat in back. Lucy just watched things going by. There was a long silence from Darryl, not a sound. The sheriff looked at Frank. Frank would think about that gaze for a long time. He seemed to be taking in the long way Frank had fallen.

Lucy, Frank and Darryl got into Darryl’s truck. First, they went to Lucy’s house. She got out and in shame, rage or both, walked straight to her door without a word to either Frank or Darryl.

“I think she’s sore,” said Frank. He was getting depressed.

“Yeah.” Darryl looked depressed too. They sat for a moment in front of Lucy’s house, the truly ghastly colors of a new day rising behind the tall ash trees along the street, jerky bird movements among the branches.

Darryl said, “I wonder if there’s anything we could have said.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The whole thing is a bad deal.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Frank.

“Well, it wasn’t
her
fault.”

“Let’s get you your new truck. Maybe if I take a good hammering on that I’ll feel a little better. I’m almost suicidal.”

“You’re just sobering up.”

“There are a couple of other things.”

“They call it self-pity.”

“Okay, Darryl, I’ve got it coming.”

Darryl put it in gear and headed up the street to Frank’s house to get his checkbook. “I’ll just be a sec,” Frank said, and went in the house. He pulled out half the drawers in the kitchen before he found what he was looking for. He could have waited a bit and stopped at the office, but he knew Eileen was so demoralized that his appearance would have put her away. He also knew he couldn’t bring himself to break in a new secretary. But now he had the checkbook and went back outside.

Darryl was gone and a note fluttered on the sidewalk gate: “Forget it.”

He sat with his fishing tackle at the great corrugated base of a black cottonwood tree whose broad and leafy branches shaded an undercut run. He rolled over on his back and watched the big white clouds, barely moving toward the east, drifting on in a unit against the insistent deep blue of the sky. This seemed to him to be a grand and wholly acceptable arcade where his various sins were simply booths to be revisited with amusement. He wondered how Dante had failed to perfect one of his circles for the philandering sportsman: ravaged by his own hounds, flogged with his own fishing poles, dancing over his own buckshot. He joyously felt himself idling, an unreflective mood in which water was water, sky was sky, breeze was breeze. He knew it couldn’t last.

He got up and strung his rod together and in a minute he was in the river with a box of flies in his shirt pocket. He could barely sense his business behind him, spinning toward failure. He didn’t even have waders but was comfortable in the summer flow. The river was low and the gravel bars were prominent. He moved along until he could find some fish feeding. There was nothing going on where he had slept, in the deep run, though surely there were fish there. Nothing in the sparkling tail-out below the next big pool. But in a slender side channel he saw a string of fish feeding on flying ants.

Did he have a flying ant imitation in his fly box? He looked and yes, he did. He tied it on and made a very cautious presentation to the most downstream fish. The fish took in a silver swirl that faintly betrayed the colors of its flanks. Frank gave it some slack; the fish dropped back where it couldn’t scare its fellows and in a minute was in hand, an East Slope cutthroat, a rare bird on this river. He let that one go and eased up on the next and caught it, a little butterball brown trout that jumped four times. He hooked the next one; he could see it was a brown trout by the yellow flash as it took his fly down. A smart fish, it moved up through the others, scared them off, bolted and broke the fine leader.

Two hours had gone by. Frank crawled up on the bank, pushing his rod ahead of himself, and when on dry land, rolled over to face the sun and dry off. A slight shadow went through his mind as he reflected that this was Wednesday, conventionally viewed as a workday. But this soon passed. Work? The question chilled him. He’d better figure that out fast. He’d better work for something or quit taking up room. Though what was wrong with taking up room? He hadn’t asked to be put in this position. He was a byproduct of his parents’ sex life unless, given those austere times, he was the entire product. Hard to picture from the current carnival.

The worst was that he had been “meant” for someone and now he was not “meant” for anyone. His fear was that if he was not meant for any
one
, then it might follow that he wasn’t meant for any
thing
. He wasn’t a scientist or an artist. He was just a businessman, really. Still, he believed that he asked the big questions. He knew that scientists and artists believed that only they asked the big questions. They believed it was their job to ask the questions the answers to which the general population required for their well-being, but never asked themselves. Why? Because, it would seem to follow, the general population was too fucking stupid. This belief was behind the impression that artists and scientists often made among ordinary people, of being blowhards, or assholes. He admitted loving his bouts of brainlessness: the fish tight against the rod, the strange woman smiling across
the corridor as the light from the Coke machine shone on her lipstick, the dog barking beyond the railroad tracks. When you analyzed something, it owned you. You ought, as the Bible suggested, to watch, and wait. Frank smiled at his own thoughts, rolled onto his stomach and watched the river.

By the time he got to the office, several things had changed. First, he had certainly come to realize that he was going to have to take hold of practical matters while he could. He pretended that his emotional hegira had been a kind of renewal, but his body and the vague feeling of being stunned denied that. He had evidently recovered his old abstracted yet purposeful self because his secretary had lost her sardonic aura and fell right in behind the renewal of his routines. There was a mausoleum tidiness about his desk that implied absence and neglect of business.