Nothing but Blue Skies Read Free

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 tomoralize 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.

2
    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 reallyjust 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