Nothing but Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane Read Free Book Online Page A

down to Louisiana when he had taken a shit out his future in-laws’ upstairs window. He rested his hand on his stomach and thought about how Bunker Hunt used to bring his lunch in a brown bag, creating a reputation for penury, when in fact the bag was filled with the kind of gourmet items you couldn’t buy just anywhere. He picked up the phone and dialed Grant Weller, a cattle order buyer, and after a few formulaic remarks and parryings over price, bought another 500 six-hundred-pound steers, which he appended, with one more call, to the loan secured by his best property, his real trophy, the Alpenglow Clinic. He had a place to run them at ten bucks a head per month, about two bucks worse than he was doing with the Salvation Army. He needed to park them only a short while, until he could get them on feed.
    “Good heavens. Where are these going?” asked his banker, George Carnahan, with a gasp.
    “I’m going to background them at Mission Feeders. Call me for the deposits. Gotta go, bye.” He hung up, sat back and thought. He returned to the window. The old couple were gone. He could see the candy wrapper on the ground and walked out of his office into the hallway. He went down two doors and into the travel agency, waved to the secretary and went past to a smaller office.

7
    Lucy Dyer was at her desk, didn’t really notice him in her doorway. The wall was covered with posters, tropical getaways for people in the extreme north. He always looked at the brown girl wearing little more than a dive watch under the waterfall in Kauai. Lucy had a long brown braid wound up behind her head and wore a navy blue jacket over a white open-throated silk shirt. Once when Frank worked on a road crew in Yellowstone, when he was young, a girl who looked like Lucy stopped in her convertible while a bulldozer crossed the road. They spoke briefly, Frank put down his shovel and got in the convertible. When he returned two weeks later, the job was gone. He could remember still the smell of the evergreens and dusty tar, hear the mountain stream that roared along that road, remember every instant of the two weeks. She was a lovely rich girl in her own Mustang convertible, but she did give him gonorrhea. He drove all the way to Laramie, Wyoming, to feel anonymous enough to see a doctor.
    He sat down opposite Lucy and tilted slightly in his chair. He sighed and drifted forward in his imagination to winter, a scene in which one shoulders from the front door to the car through volumes of north wind. He rested on an image of jumper cable attachment, his imaginary self disappearing in the rooster tails of blowing snow that follow passing cars. Lucy was watching.
    “How about a converted slave quarters on Nevis?”
    “What month?”
    “January.” She pushed a brochure at him.
    “I don’t think so. I want something, I don’t know, something that would take me back to the glory days —”
    “The early seventies.”
    “But exactly.”
    “How about a hammock on Cay Caulker, Belize?”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it. It’s a straight shot across the gulf.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Meaning you could pick up an oldies station out of Houston.”
    “Oh, Lucy.” He thought for a moment. “Is there a brochure?”
    “I think that would be very much out of keeping with the spirit of my suggestion.”
    “Quite right. How about the local weed?”
    “I’m sure they can find you some…‘good shit.’ And if you like the hammock, you can always grow your own.”
    “I see.”
    The room fell quiet. A car antenna moved into view in the window, backed up and rotated to a stop. Something was coming up inside Frank. Voices outside, laughter, more voices, deals, assignations. I hope it goes on for a million years, thought Frank gratefully, defying gravity and cold. Now he was nervous. He thought about his mother on her last day in her own house. She had a purse that weighed about fifteen pounds that had a lock on it; she had lost the key to the