The Bushwacked Piano Read Free Page B

hear me laughin a mile off and performin on some God damned instrument.” He swung his head angrily through a hundred eighty degree sweep. “When I think of them other two fat boys and what they’re missing. Shoot! they too smarted themselves that time.” Payne thought of the two fat boys ballooned against the insides of their coffins while his old friend schemed about an artificiallimb, entirely magic in its pink plastic and elastic hinges.
    The two men sat in a field of formica and did not speak. Payne could not accept the relief of an electric pinball machine that bloomed for him. Even without his gratitude, it spilled its pastel clouds and rang its bells while an unmoved player draped two fingers on the plunger and waited for it to get his victory out of its system.
    “May I have your ear?” asked C. J. Clovis, a disturbing question from an amputee. “I need your confidence. You have heard haven’t you of farmers who bring ten citrus fruits to bear from a single tree. You have heard of winter wheat. You have encountered, possibly, forced vegetables. I cannot go into it at this time; but let me say only this. There is a special application of these wonders that applies to the life of bats. And the potential? Top dollar. I will say no more.
    “My own appliance,” he continued to say, “which I mean to have in no time flat will be itself a natural wonder. I have confidence in it. It will have more actual articulations in it than a real limb. Though I will still be a monopod, this aluminum wonder will fetch me from spot to spot. Your name and address?” Payne gave it to him. “Let me drink in peace, sonny. And one last thing. Remember, won’t you, that I am in the Yellow Pages.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    You do meet some people in a bar, thought Payne who continued drinking. Gradually, he ceased to think of the unimaginable C. J. Clovis; and to nurse, instead, his obsession with the possible infidelities of Ann. He thought of calling the house but knew his fears would be heard in his voice. He was, moreover, a little intimidated by her parents. They were good at their world at least; and heseemed bad even at his. Darling be mine I love you. More Black-Jack Daniels, he said, and make it snappy. I am the customer. It was brought. “I pay,” he said lashing simoleons to the countertop. “I own a chain of wurlitzer chicken parlors and every Grade-A fryer has my brand on its ass.” Later, some entirely theoretical argument with the bartender ensued during which the bartender thrust his face over the bar at Payne to inquire how anybody was going to wage trench warfare on the moon when every time you took a step you jumped forty feet in the air. Payne reeled into the night.
    He was standing in front of the Fitzgeralds’ door, in the dark, with no good in mind. Ann would be asleep. Inside of him, where all secrets were borne in darkness, a kind of Disneyland of the intestines went into operation, throwing forth illusions, mistimings and false alarums. Payne had a moment of terrible littleness. He pulled his sleeve back to learn the time and discovered he no longer owned a watch. He felt better. He saw again how he might be illustrious. The wrought brass knocker on the recessed oak door said FITZGERALD in stern, majuscule letters; above, heraldic devices worked in the metal itself proclaimed the Fitzgeralds rampant animals of one sort or another; while below—a pause while Payne goes completely out of focus, considers his mortality, our times and the music of the spheres, and refocuses—while below, then, a semicircle of smaller English uncials warned,
“Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.”
It had been made to order, Payne surmised, by a microcephalic pump jockey from Burbank.
    A stern Payne lifted the knocker as to announce himself, stopping on the upstroke. Its squeaking changed his mood. His thoughts were awash with all the noises he hated; especiallyPomeranian dogs, wind chimes and windowpanes wailing under soft cloths. He