Nothing but Blue Skies (40 page)

Gracie appeared in the bedroom doorway and, fixing Frank with a metallic smile, said, “How could you?” Lucy finished dressing, staying well out of Gracie’s reach, and they both went downstairs. He felt unwilling to breathe.

There was an immediate uproar from below. For several moments, Frank was certain that it was composed entirely of voices; then he wasn’t so sure. Worse, he felt it was getting closer, possibly moving up the stairs. He sensed that this emotional violence favored his situation, if he lived through it. But this ill-construed tone seemed to follow him everywhere like a pox. He knew the two women were in pain, but the only thing he thought he could offer was the suggestion that they ought to dump their growth stocks and get in on these tax-free Montana highway bonds while there was still time. He saw right away that there was no chance they’d listen. They’d probably just get madder.

“It is typical of the situation we held on to for so long,” Gracie was saying, “that anything we try turns into chaos.” She was working her way down the clothesline at the side of the house on Third, clothespins under her chin, hanging out sheets, towels and Edward’s voluminous boxer shorts. “I have not been back for long, but
all
the harrowing scenes of my recent history have taken
place in that short time and they have
all
involved you in one way or another.”

“Did I tell Holly to accompany Hitler on the piano?” Frank said.

“He’s not Hitler. He’s not good, but he’s not Hitler.”

“Sorry. I know what you’re saying. Honey, you were great out there.”

“Gee, thanks. I especially wish that we could do as Edward suggests: meet in a civilized way and make sure we have left clean wounds so that the healing process can begin.”

“I’m very suspicious of this ‘healing’ concept,” Frank said. “I’ve heard a good bit about it lately and it always leads into a discussion of some unbelievably tedious ‘inner journey.’ I’m afraid I’ve grown much too old for that sort of thing. The messages of my formative years all came from Little Richard, who has never soiled himself with an inner journey.”

Gracie was unwarmed by these genial maunderings. “I wouldn’t know. I’m the bimbo who tried to sell Creole cuisine to the locals, remember?”

“You just fell down on your market research. Trail mix is the local soul food.”

Frank kept on watching Gracie hang her wash. Did this mean she didn’t own a dryer? Maybe Edward liked the smell of fresh air in his linens. These days people would do such things out of a vision of a simpler America.

Frank was looking at the clothespins, wondering how much longer they would last. He watched Gracie with endless appreciation of her concentration, her standing on tiptoes and, almost unbearably, the way, when she finally finished what she was doing, she used her thumbs to move her hair back behind her ears; that, or the way she saw him noticing. There was a momentary sense of everything else having stopped, a kind of silence, breathlessness.

Then it all came back: who he thought he was, who he thought she was, who she thought she was, who she thought he was; how, in the best case, it might well be mostly behind them, the flat earth
on which much is irrevocable. Even the bad years, he thought, even the years of psychobabble and attacking each other with the previous night’s dreams. He had despised all those poetic nature books she read with topics like “impromptu clamming” as a spiritual exercise. And she had said he had no values, not even hippie values, that he came from the world of Grain Belt beer, novelty sex and car worship, from a hick town in a hick state. We are not people, he thought, we are envoys. Seek a postponement.

Yet, when she was in front of him, close, close enough to touch, she asked him, without raising her eyes to his, “Frank, if I asked you to do something, would you consider it?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Anything?”

Frank felt his heart lock. “Anything,” he said. Gracie lifted her face and looked into his eyes. Anything, he thought.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Wait a minute, what do you want me to do?”

“You already said you would.”

“But what is it?”

“Frank, I want you to meet with Edward. I think you need to fill in all the blanks. I think you’re losing it, Frank. I think you better find out what’s what and go from there. You already gave me your reply,” said Gracie with a little curtsey. “Bye for now.” She went into the house, stopping in the doorway to say, “Remember what a good sport I’ve been about you fucking that sorry whore in my old spindle bed.”

Frank was going to speak but the door was now closed. Instead of an arch that embowered their conversation, it was now the bald front of a house. And the road to finality was clear as daylight.

The Kid Royale Hotel and chicken farm was being picketed by the Preservation League. It was a beautiful day for picketing, with a bright sky filled with bright nimbus clouds and a gentle breeze from the west that carried a smell of lawns, a superb day for protest. Frank had known it was only a matter of time until they
got here. One young woman walked up and down in front of the hotel in a sandwich board while she read a book. The sign said:

“I’m Frank Copenhaver,” he said as he passed her by. “Why don’t you put a group together and buy me out? I could use the money.”

“Yeah, right. You’re a tycoon, mister.”

“I was getting there all right, but my bank says I’ve failed. Now I want to join you in the granola underworld.”

Without looking up from her book, she said, “This is harassment. Another word and I’ll turn your ass in.”

A blast of odor greeted Frank when he opened the door. He held it open long enough so that he could picture the invisible progress of the smell onto the sidewalk. There were few pedestrians but they reacted physically to its arrival with shrinking movements and rapid gaits. Here comes your regional heritage, Frank thought, on the wings of a dove. The picketers might well decide to do their work in the form of meditative petitions issued from fern-filled quarters in another part of town.

Frank was thrilled to step into the lobby and hear the racket of Orville Conway and his family, two tall boys and his big freckled wife with a scarf tied over her head. They greeted him and kept working; as he wandered through the building, he saw them nailing up chicken wire, running PVC pipe in the hallways to water the birds, rigging doors and corner roosts. One boy was hauling chicken feed and oyster shells in heavy sacks that hung from his broad shoulders while his mother guided a push broom down the corridors. The younger boy, wearing a Walkman, ran a nail gun as he secured the wire with lath strips. Over the din of their work, a cultivated voice chanted outside through a bullhorn a rhyme about it being no mystery what chickens do to history. The second floor, meanwhile, was completely up and running.
Orville took Frank down the chicken-wired, doorless rooms filled with genial chickens greeting Frank with a wave of complaisant clucks. Orville looked upon them with admiration, a few strands of blond hair spilling from his wide head.

“I believe we’re to where we can see it might work,” he said.

“I’m excited about this, Orville.”

“The wife and I, we was hoping.”

“You’re all working so hard, I’m just glad to be in partners with you.”

“Them folks in front ain’t no bother. They’ll get tired pretty quick. We used to sell them organic chickens at the farmers’ market. One old gal pulled this dressed chicken’s legs apart and give it a sniff and told the missus it wasn’t fresh. The missus said, ‘Hell lady, Marilyn Monroe couldn’t pass that test.’ Us, we don’t get tired. Me, Shirl, nor them boys. We call them folks out front died-again Christians.”

Frank wandered around and tried to convey his enthusiasm to the Conway family and walked back outside through the picketers.

“It’s a changing world,” said one wise male picketer in long dreadlocks.

Frank told him, “It’s a fact, Jack.”

Then he got in his car and drove out to the town of Impact to pick up his scale receipts for his yearlings. He never had gotten them and it looked as if he’d need a mountain of paper to slow that bank down. On the narrow paved road, he passed a small buck that had been hit by a car, its head angled back sharply; its antlers lay on the pavement about fifteen feet away. There were several vertical, ribbed white clouds in the blue sky that looked like the afterimages of spinning tops. A truck went by with a license plate that read, “44
MAG.”

He picked up his receipts from the woman who ran the general store. He bought the
Sun
because of its interesting headline,
BABY STOLEN FROM MOM’S WOMB WHILE SHE SLEEPS
, and the
Enquirer
, which reported that Bill Cosby was working on his own test tube baby, and which revealed that Sonny Bono’s memoirs stated several
important things about Cher:
A
, she was a lousy lover;
B
, she was so stupid she thought the moon was part of the sun; and
C
, she had been unfaithful with certain members of his band.

Frank remembered being out here long ago, grossly loaded, having to follow “Lewis and Clark Trail” signs the state had erected just to get home. He drove through the low, undulating hills covered with sagebrush and serviceberry bushes. Lightnin’ Hopkins sang on the radio, “You know my little woman ain’t no Mexican…,” making Frank daydream of his own true love, now connected to him by a thread. His mind was in ribbons thinking of all their trials on this lonesome road. White hair in five minutes.

But out there, all around, was his god of handsome land. As it leveled off before the car, other country flowed into it from his past: the cedar breaks and cotton fields of Texas, the big sun there and softer clouds, cotton wagons behind tractors, little caliche roads, senderos, heading off to pumping stations in the distance … twenty-four-year-old Gracie next to him, trying to find something good on the radio. The old man in the service station looked affectionately at the two of them and said, as a kind of invitation, “If you ever wear out a pair of boots in west Texas, you’ll never leave.” Now Frank’s tear ducts clamped like little fists and tears poured down his cheeks. He rested his teeth on the steering wheel and tried to see the road through swimming eyes. It had been so good.

Judge Elvin Blaylock, his T-shirt showing at the neck of his judicial robes, gazed for a moment at the accused, announced that he found him guilty of disturbing the peace and fined him one hundred dollars. The clerk of the court was the only one present, but nevertheless the judge was circumspect in asking Frank to come to his bench so that he might speak to him
sotto voce
. He said, “I would like to see you in my chambers.” He got up, declared that court was adjourned and exited through a door behind him. Frank waited for a moment and followed.

He closed the door behind him. Judge Blaylock was standing in boxer shorts and T-shirt. Frank asked, “Is that what you had on under the robe?”

“What’s it to you, big boy,” lisped the judge.

“Just asking.”

“Frank, asshole. May I call you asshole?”

“Another time, Elvin. I’m not strong just now.”

Blaylock came up close to Frank and cuffed him lightly in the head and then, seeming contrite, smoothed his hair back for him. “Frank, you and I have known each other all our lives. Your old man did pretty well. You and Mike got a little start. My old man ran a snow plow for the county when he wasn’t drunk. We had zip, okay? That’s why I worked to get where I am. It’s no big deal
to anyone but me, okay? But you, Frank, you’re heading the other way. You just believe that anything you throw away you can always get again. I just want to be the one guy you know from way back to tell you that if that’s what you think, I want to wish you all the luck in the world. Kind of like, ‘So long, it’s been good to know you.’ ”

Frank rocked his head, exhibiting a cheery dismay at taking this in. Inside, he felt a chill.

“Edward, do you mind that I have called your house?” Frank had made himself hold off for one full day.

“Not at all, Frank.”

“I’ve got to ask Gracie one or two things. I —”

“Come on over! We’re just a hop, skip and a jump.”

Edward let him in the door, asking, “Shall I make myself scarce?” It was Sunday and church bells rang across the town.

“No need. I won’t be long.” This was so brittle that Frank could feel all his back muscles clenching. He noticed that Edward had a small ponytail held in place with a rubber band. Was that new?

“Tell you what,” Edward said, “I’ve got bromeliads to mist and this is a good time for it. Before I go, may I say in all sincerity that I am really looking forward to our meeting.”

“I thought I’d get into that with uh —”

“Gracie!” he boomed in high mellifluousness.

“Exactly.”

Gracie appeared in the doorway to a side room through which shone a subaqueous light. “Hi, Frank.” Both Edward and Lucy were present in this brief remark.

“Hello, Gracie.”

There was such deep-seated fraud in these plain greetings that Frank had an instant of looking forward to his part in the war on deception.

Edward seemed to take in this bracing moment of awkwardness before flailing his arms out in a gesture that declared he was leaving. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but I wish things were more normal.”

Frank followed Gracie into a glassed-in room with a floor made of large slate flags, greenish in color. There was a row of potted plants, some in flower, some climbing like vines up the redwood lattice that had been provided for them. Here and there were white wicker chairs and chaise longues with striped canvas seat covers. It was a pleasant room that reminded Frank of what semi-lousy taste he and Gracie had. They weren’t quite the avocado Formica people who had increased so in numbers, but compared to homosexuals and Episcopalians, they were remarkably tasteless; or if in their life together they had ever had anything good, they failed to take care of it. It was a genuine case of not being very well bred. Fishing tackle in the living room, wet towels drying out on the handlebars of the stationary bicycle, sanitary napkins on an open shelf in the guest bathroom — Frank and Gracie had, at their best, strengths elsewhere.