Nothing but Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane Read Free Book Online

matters, and had become an eavesdropper.
    Frank went out onto Main Street where a crew was making repairs. It was still spring and the smell of hot tar was its classic smell on Main Street.
    “Wake up!” said a voice, and Frank focused suddenly. A man stood in front of him in a seersucker suit, the tie pulled down and askew. He was hawk-eyed and intense. It was Dick Hoiness, his insurance man.
    “Dick! God, I was elsewhere. You’re right.” Cars had started to pile up at the light on Grand. Spring sunshine boomed from all the car colors. Frank thought, Where am I?
    “Well, how are you?”
    “I’m all right,” said Frank. “At least that.” Someone tapped a car horn and Frank flicked a wave without looking into the glitter of windshields.
    “Frank, when you get a minute, we need to go over the farm buildings I’ve got covered with you.”
    “You’ve got the houses, right?” Frank felt himself concentrate, somewhat unwillingly, on an inventory of buildings.
    “I’ve got the houses and the main shops and of course the clinic. I just need to double-check before we renew. I think we’re insuring more buildings than you really care about. You still got the grain farm and the ranch I know of?”
    “Yes, but that could change. Mike splits the ranch bills. We own that together. What about the old hotel?”
    “Untouchable firetrap, Frank,” said Dick, backing off into the flow of pedestrians before continuing on his way. An exchange of waves and they parted into the sunny day. Frank thought about his insurance man; he’d known him for a long time. Dick had been a bassist in a local band, got his long hair cut off in 1980, then got in trouble for drugs, cleared that up, and when the Mission Mountain Band was wiped out, he took it as a sign that an era had ended and went looking for what was then known as a straightjob. He had done well and now lived with his small family in Chokecherry Canyon. It was getting harder and harder to remember one’s old hippie friends as they disappeared into local society; but like them, Frank Copenhaver went on with the vaguely disreputable feeling acquired during those years, a feeling that later gave him a coolness, a detachment toward his adversaries. A refrain went through his mind from an old song: “It ain’t me, it ain’t me …”
    Frank glanced at an architectural magazine on his desk — “Bogus Colonials Invade Boston” — and a sporting magazine with a story about a man who pitches camp on the drifting carcass of a dead whale, hoping to ambush a great white shark. Definitely have to have his outfit dry cleaned after that venture. Frank couldn’t bring himself to make his calls. I’m guilty, he was thinking. He dug into the morning news. Baby boomers were buying vintage guitars: bits of splintered lumber formerly owned by Pete Townshend, various “workhorse” Stratocasters, nostalgic early-middle-agers battling the Japanese for Buddy Holly’s Gibson, flame-patterned Les Paul models sailing across the Pacific to museums.
    He went to the window. An old couple in the yard of the small house next door, now surrounded by offices like Frank’s, took in the midday sun. He had seen them before. They were very old, and she quite senile. The old man always wore a suit and his little wife a kind of sack dress, probably so that the weak old man could manage to pull it over her head when helping her dress. Frank observed while the old man slowly unwrapped a piece of candy for his wife. She watched patiently.
    Frank went back to his desk. It was becoming hard for him not to think of work as something completely made up, no matter how remunerative. It seemed an excuse for not loafing. He was sometimes surprised everyone didn’t see through it. This was Gracie’s old pitch and he had never bought it. He had taken it that she was attacking his achievement. But it was time to go ahead and do something. The pork chop sandwich was starting tochurn. He remembered that first trip