The Bushwacked Piano Read Free Page A

on aircraft carriers in World War Two, flight deck jitterbugs with the kamikazes coming in for the coup de grace; it was the very dance a bosun’s mate and a chief petty officer might have done a hundred and fifty-three miles out of Saipan with an eighty-five piece Navy orchestra playing Flatfoot Floogie on top of four hundred thousand tons of high explosives in a state of being approached by a religious Japanese in a bomb plane.
    Payne headed back to his table, but some oddball had glommed it. “Who’s the oddball?” he asked the bartender.
    “You are.”
    “I saw a sign in the urinal that said ‘Please do not eat the mints.’ This goes for you.” The bartender forced a laugh, throwing back his head so that Payne could examine the twin black ovals divided by the stem of his nose. He went to his table anyway, carrying a fresh whiskey. “Tell me about your family,” he said to the oddball.
    “Three of us is all,” smiled the other, “two dogs and a snake.” Payne looked at him, feeling his brain torquedown into its first focus of the evening. The man picked up one of his galoshes from the floor and held it to his own ear. “I can hear Akron, Ohio,” he announced. Payne was enthralled.
    The man was sloppy and stretched-looking. Seeing Payne look, he boasted of having been most monstrously fat.
    “Guess.”
    “Two hundred,” Payne said.
    “Close. Five years ago, I weighed four eighty. C. J. Clovis. You call me Jack.” He pushed himself up. He was missing a leg. Then Payne saw the crutches. Clovis was neckless, not burly, and his head just sat in the soft puddle of his shoulders. “I lost more weight than I can lift!” He directed Payne’s attention to the various malformations of his skeleton produced by the vanished weight. The hips were splayed, for example. “My feet went flat! I had varicose veins popping on me! Danger looked from every which way!” He told Payne about his two friends in the Upper Peninsula who both weighed over four hundred and who, like Clovis, were brokenhearted because at that weight they couldn’t get any pussy. Therefore, they took a vow to lose all their excess. He dieted under the care of a doctor; his friends went on crashes of their own design. In the beginning he had reduced too fast and, consequently, as his body fed off itself, gave himself gout.
    “Then I got this old fat man’s disease, gangrene, and lost my leg.”
    “How long ago was this when you lost your … leg?”
    “A month. But I’m going to get me an appliance and I’m as good as gold.”
    “They say a missing limb continues to hurt.”
    “Oh, naturally yes. Of an occasion.”
    “How did these other fat guys make out?”
    “How did they make out?”
    “I mean how did they reduce?”
    “They reduced all right,” said C. J. Clovis, looking angrily toward the bar.
    “What do you mean?” Payne asked.
    “They’re dead!” Clovis looked around fidgeting, looked out the window and fidgeted furiously before looking back at Payne suddenly. “I’m going to get me some appliance!” His hands flew aloft like fat birds.
    “I believe that you are, Jack.”
    “I’ll be rockin and a rollin,” he said with religious glee. “I’ll be good as gold! I’ll have a time! Do you understand, God damn it?”
    “… yes …”
    “Stay a while and see me smile! Give me a chance and I’m gone to dance! I’ll do the backover flip every trip! I’m gone to be reelin off the ceilin with a very happy feelin!
I’ll be good as gold!
” Jack Clovis locked his eyes in position throughout the recital. Payne was locked in a paroxysm of embarrassment. “That is my pome,” said Jack Clovis. “You take it or leave it.”
    “I’ll take it.”
    “I could turn pro, Buster. You remember that.” Being called Buster was the only part Payne didn’t like.
    “At what,” he asked baldly.
    “Why after I get that appliance I might take up an instrument. I could go a hundred different ways. You’ll be able to