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Authors: Thomas McGuane
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this far north. It was sold—through the
Wall Street Journal
—by Ansel Brayton’s grandson, a well-known Hialeah faggot.
Fitzgerald was proud of his place and often said to his wife, “The ranch is good, Edna.” He would stroll along the willows of his river frontage or along the lane of Lombardy poplars, stop beside the lush irrigated hayfields now mowed and raked, with the bales still lying in the combedgolden order of the harvested acreage. It was his ranch, not Edna’s.
Of course, she wanted as small a part of it as she could. From his G.M. earnings he had set up separate investment facilities for the two of them; and it produced a little happy contention. She had built, with her share, a wig bank on Woodward Avenue for the storage of hairpieces in up-to-date, sanitary conditions. She often compared its profitable records with the slightly scary losses of the Double Tepee. Fitzgerald had visited his wife’s operation, walking through the ultraviolet vaults filled from floor to ceiling with disinfected hairpieces. It was not the Mountain West in there. Stunted workmen in pale green uniforms wheeled stainless wagons of billowing human hair down sloping corridors. Prototypes of wig style rested on undetailed plastic heads. No sirree, Bob, thought Fitzgerald, I’ll take Montana.
The living room of the ranch house was two stories high with a balcony at the second story. It was all done in a kind of rustic art nouveau: birchbark ormulu and decorated extravaganzas of unpeeled log.
At the north end of the first floor was the library where they held today’s meeting. The question at hand was whether or not to call the police. “I don’t know,” said Missus Fitzgerald, “any use of the police at all downgrades everyone involved.”
“They are merely a facility.”
“But they mean something tacky,” she said.
“They are a simple public facility.”
“I know what a public facility is,” she said.
“Okay, all right.” He waved her off with both hands.
“It’s as if something low—”
“We pay for them. We ought to use them.”
“Something shabby—”
In 1929 the Fitzgeralds were married. On their first morning together, he bellowed for his breakfast. She called the police on him.
“—merely—”
“—even vulgar or—”
He never asked for his breakfast again. Not like that. Sometimes he got it anyway, in those early days. Now the maids brought it. He bellowed at them, like in 1929. Let them try the law.
“Call the police,” said Fitzgerald doggedly. “Tell them the circumstances. They’ll hand Payne his walking papers so fast. Or I’ll get the bugger on the phone myself. I’ll tell him he just doesn’t figure. Do you read me?”
In 1929, when two large bozos of the police profession snatched the up-and-coming economist from his breakfast table, he had doubts about the future of his marriage. As the shadow of his struggling form left a bowl of Instant Ralston in uneaten solitude, a vacuum fell between them that later became tiny but never disappeared. “The year of the crash,” he often said wryly, meaning his own little avalanche.
Missus Fitzgerald had lost her rancor, temporarily, in the realization that Payne’s inroads had been made possible by a certain amount of cooperation if not actual encouragement from Ann. It was so dispiriting. A pastiche of lurid evidence made it clear what she had been up to. Infamy and disgrace seemed momentary possibilities. And though she took a certain comfort from such abstractions, there were dark times when she saw an exaggerated reality in her mind’s eye of Payne hitching in naked fury over her spread-eagled daughter or worse, the opposite of that. At those times, Missus Fitzgerald scarfed tranquilizersagain and again until all she could think of was heavy machinery lumbering in vast clay pits.
Fitzgerald was thinking he should have slapped the piss out of her in 1929, that rare crazy year. (Sixteen years before Payne was born when
Wall Street Journal
—by Ansel Brayton’s grandson, a well-known Hialeah faggot.
Fitzgerald was proud of his place and often said to his wife, “The ranch is good, Edna.” He would stroll along the willows of his river frontage or along the lane of Lombardy poplars, stop beside the lush irrigated hayfields now mowed and raked, with the bales still lying in the combedgolden order of the harvested acreage. It was his ranch, not Edna’s.
Of course, she wanted as small a part of it as she could. From his G.M. earnings he had set up separate investment facilities for the two of them; and it produced a little happy contention. She had built, with her share, a wig bank on Woodward Avenue for the storage of hairpieces in up-to-date, sanitary conditions. She often compared its profitable records with the slightly scary losses of the Double Tepee. Fitzgerald had visited his wife’s operation, walking through the ultraviolet vaults filled from floor to ceiling with disinfected hairpieces. It was not the Mountain West in there. Stunted workmen in pale green uniforms wheeled stainless wagons of billowing human hair down sloping corridors. Prototypes of wig style rested on undetailed plastic heads. No sirree, Bob, thought Fitzgerald, I’ll take Montana.
The living room of the ranch house was two stories high with a balcony at the second story. It was all done in a kind of rustic art nouveau: birchbark ormulu and decorated extravaganzas of unpeeled log.
At the north end of the first floor was the library where they held today’s meeting. The question at hand was whether or not to call the police. “I don’t know,” said Missus Fitzgerald, “any use of the police at all downgrades everyone involved.”
“They are merely a facility.”
“But they mean something tacky,” she said.
“They are a simple public facility.”
“I know what a public facility is,” she said.
“Okay, all right.” He waved her off with both hands.
“It’s as if something low—”
“We pay for them. We ought to use them.”
“Something shabby—”
In 1929 the Fitzgeralds were married. On their first morning together, he bellowed for his breakfast. She called the police on him.
“—merely—”
“—even vulgar or—”
He never asked for his breakfast again. Not like that. Sometimes he got it anyway, in those early days. Now the maids brought it. He bellowed at them, like in 1929. Let them try the law.
“Call the police,” said Fitzgerald doggedly. “Tell them the circumstances. They’ll hand Payne his walking papers so fast. Or I’ll get the bugger on the phone myself. I’ll tell him he just doesn’t figure. Do you read me?”
In 1929, when two large bozos of the police profession snatched the up-and-coming economist from his breakfast table, he had doubts about the future of his marriage. As the shadow of his struggling form left a bowl of Instant Ralston in uneaten solitude, a vacuum fell between them that later became tiny but never disappeared. “The year of the crash,” he often said wryly, meaning his own little avalanche.
Missus Fitzgerald had lost her rancor, temporarily, in the realization that Payne’s inroads had been made possible by a certain amount of cooperation if not actual encouragement from Ann. It was so dispiriting. A pastiche of lurid evidence made it clear what she had been up to. Infamy and disgrace seemed momentary possibilities. And though she took a certain comfort from such abstractions, there were dark times when she saw an exaggerated reality in her mind’s eye of Payne hitching in naked fury over her spread-eagled daughter or worse, the opposite of that. At those times, Missus Fitzgerald scarfed tranquilizersagain and again until all she could think of was heavy machinery lumbering in vast clay pits.
Fitzgerald was thinking he should have slapped the piss out of her in 1929, that rare crazy year. (Sixteen years before Payne was born when
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