Nothing but Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane Page A

wanton cackling soon poured from the living room. It’s a shame I had to show up, Frank thought. He now had so much food in the wok it was hard to turn it over with the spatula and keep the bottom from burning.
    “Anybody gonna help?” he called.
    “No!” June said.
    He ground up Szechuan peppers with the butt of the cleaver handle and sprinkled them into the cooking food. He tried it and added garlic, then rice wine vinegar. It was getting there. He opened the refrigerator with the toe of his shoe and looked for beer: there was plenty, and the food was going to be hot.
    “Come and get it or I’ll throw it out!” While the women came from the next room, he piled bowls and utensils, placed the six-packs of beer on the table in their holders, shoved the soy sauce and other condiments to the center and set the wok on a pot holder. They swept into the room with an audible rush and sat down. Frank rubbed his hands and said, “New blood.”
    “You wish,” said June. “They’re bad,” she said to the other women.
    “It’s never new enough for these butterflies as they float from flower to flower,” Lucy said.
    Frank was always surprised by the capacity of women for a kind of clubbiness with one another. These three already seemed to be old friends. Men would still have been eyeing each other’s shoes and watches, listening for accents.
    “What do you think of this, Joanie?” Frank asked her.
    Joanie looked rural and lost for just a moment, then focused on the food. “What is it?”
    “Gallatin County Thousand Sighs Resfriados.”
    “Oh.”
    Frank dished out the food. It was like summer camp. The women were artificially elated, and the energy of unexpressed wit seemed to fill the room.
    Joanie took one last doubtful look at her food and said, “Over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes!”
    Frank quaffed a beer to catch up. June told about a customer who constantly complained about his Buick, coming to the agency to gripe about mysterious noises. Today, she finally gathered a group of mechanics and sales people and placed the complaining customer, a circuit court judge, in the middle and asked him to imitate the sound his Buick was making in the hopes one of them would know what it was. The judge made a series of whining chugs — which June tried to render — followed by a low whistle, repeated them five times for his appreciative audience, only to have June tell him, “We’ll have to get back to you on this.” Wild laughter filled the dining room. The immense Joanie rose to a semi-crouch and popped four beers. “More beer for my lieutenants,” she said, astonishing every sweating face around the table as she passed them out. June filled her mouth with stir-fry, widened her eyes and said, “Shit fire!” Lucy quietly slid her hand up the inside of Frank’s thigh and Joanie shouted, “Drop his dick, lady, you’re busted.” The gaping faces stared around giddily.
    “What a dinner party!” Frank yelled, surprised at the volumeof his own voice. He looked across at Joanie’s beef red slab of a face and wondered what would come out of it next.
    “Guess who stood outside my window watching me undress last month?”
    “Who?”
    Lucy jabbed her thumb sideways in Frank’s direction. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, kept chewing. This wasn’t real insouciance.
    “Oh, Frank,” crooned June. It was hard to tell whether or not she was disapproving.
    “So what did you do,” Joanie asked, “call 911?”
    “I sent him to the Arctic Circle,” Lucy said. She looked around at the bewildered faces and added, “I’m a travel agent.” It didn’t seem to clear up much, but she didn’t enlarge on it and “Arctic Circle” was absorbed as some sort of expression, descriptive of a deplorable state reached in many modern relationships.
    It was here that Frank thought he would try to explain. He would tell them about the sense of freedom he had prowling around in the middle of the