The Bushwacked Piano Read Free

a horse who wasn’t going to finish. Edna said he just didn’t figure.
    But Payne and Ann saw each other morning, noon and night. A certain amount of that time was inevitably spent up to no good. For Payne—and for Ann too—the whole thing seemed one of life’s maniacal evocations, a dimensional reach-through, heaven.
    Once, for instance, they were on Payne’s little boat; he was in the cabin, adjusting the flame on the parabolic butane heater. Ann was on the bunk beside him, Payne in a Jesuitical hysteria of cross-purposes. Ann, clearly, prettily, waited for it. And Payne gave her one too, just like that. He looked underneath as he mounted her: a herring leaping from bank to bank, a marine idyll. Ann, for her part, should have never told him to hold on to his hat; because for an alarming instant he just couldn’t get going at all. She patted him with encouragement and told him we were a big boy now. She slipped her ankles up behind his knees. Payne felt as though he were inflating, becoming a squeaking surface that enlarged getting harder and paler, a weather balloon rising through the stratosphere, merely a collapsed sack at the beginning, growing rounder and thinner with altitude, then the burst and long crazy fall to the ocean.
    Afterwards they watched a Lake Erie sunset together; a bleached and watery sun eased itself down on the horizon and broke like a blister, seeping red light over the poison lake. They could count the seven stacks of the Edison Electric Company. They smelled with affection the effluentsof Wyandotte Chemical. They slept in one another’s arms on the colloidal, slightly radioactive swell.
    Next day, he had a little hang-over. He smoked grass and consequently had the notion his chair was singing in a languid Dick Haymes voice. Outside, he was convinced the sky had been vulcanized. He tried to call Ann and got her mother who was cool to him. She reminded Payne that the whole family was packing to go to the ranch in Montana and that maybe it would be better if Payne called at the end of the summer.
    Payne still could not believe that Ann would spend a minute with the other one. It broke his heart to think so. Her family hated him. She was always reluctant because of that to have him in the house at all. They knew he wasn’t working. They had seen him on motorcycles and felt he had thrown his education away. Now, on the phone, Ann’s porcine mother had it in her heart to tell him to wait until the end of summer to call. Payne doted on the pleasure it would bring to shoot the old cunt in the spine.
    “Bartender,” Payne said, “my glass is leaking.” He looked at the flashing sign of the Pontchartrain Bar, visible from in here. “Have you ever tasted cormorant?”
    He didn’t know George Russell, the other, but he didn’t hesitate to call him on the phone. “Listen George,” he said, “I demand a cessation of stupidities on your part.”
    “Oh, Payne,” George said with pity.
    “I want to help you.”
    “Ah, Payne, please not that.”
    “I remember you said once George that you could not live without lapels.”
    “I didn’t say that,” said George with a debonair tone.
    “I cannot live without lapels.”
    “That’s not true. Are you drunk or taking dope?”
    “Whether it’s true or not, why did you say it?”
    “I didn’t say it.”
    “What could it mean?”
    “I didn’t say it.”
    “What could that mean? ‘I cannot live without lapels’?”
    “Payne,” George interrupted. “Can you live with this: Ann has been seeing me. Can you?” All Payne could remember about George was that he was what dentists call a mouthbreather. He had decent teeth which he had bought at an auction of Woodrow Wilson’s effects. George hung up. Payne had one foot in the abyss.
    Someone put some change in the jukebox. Two couples who knew each other materialized in a sentimental jitterbug. It was the kind of thing sailors did with each other and with brooms when they were brokenhearted