Nothing but Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane Page B

night, the sense of surprise, but Joanie jumped in to call, “Curiosity killed the cat,” and raised her arms like a choirmaster as the others cheered, “Satisfaction brought him back!”
    “I was trying to get to the bottom of things,” he said, and got booed. He opened another beer and pushed his bowl away from himself. The others did the same. It was like a women’s locker room and he was the towel boy. Lucy belched without self-consciousness and looked off in thought.
    “We should count our blessings,” she said with faint gloom, “that we haven’t arrived at the moon of the cruise and package tours.”
    “What’s this all about?” June asked, rifling her purse until she found a lipstick. She screwed it up into her view, squinted and began applying it to her lips. Frank knew June as someone who deplored all avoidable melancholy.
    “I mean, my company should be called Last Fling Tours. I don’t know if I want to work there anymore. It’s sort of depressing.”
    “That people get old?” June asked. “I can’t wait to get old. I thank God I’m not a day under forty-one.”
    “No, that they should do all this catching up at the end. Do you have any idea the quantity of adult diapers a cruise ship carries?”
    “Oh, Lucy, come on.”
    “I’m serious.”
    “I think it’s touching,” said Joanie, “and if the ship goes down, it makes a kind of romantic ending.” Frank missed Joanie’s point, seeing only diapers bobbing on an empty sea.
    June said, “I suppose we could take this view of everything. Every silver lining has a cloud. You guys think everything is a tearjerker. I sell convertibles to some very desperate people. I’m just sorry there’s not more of them. I’d have me a big rolling ranch outside of town like the cook here. Walking horses. Hounds. Yeah, that’s right. Y’all come. Sayonara ragtops.”
    “You don’t want a ranch, June,” Frank said. “Or if you do, I’ll sell you mine.”
    “You can’t sell it,” said June. “It’s the old family place.”
    “Watch me.”
    “Ever since I first met you, you’ve been wanting to get rid of it. Why’s this?”
    “None of us live out there and it’s hard to keep it going, keep the weeds down, keep it irrigated, keep it fenced. You can’t find ranch hands. If they’re easy to get along with, they don’t work, and vice versa. I just fired one today. I hated it. Hard worker. I shouldn’t hire people because I can’t stand to fire anybody. This was a little different. He got me off the hook by insulting me. So, at first I was comfortable about letting him go. Now I’m unhappy again. I called his wife. She was literally savage to me, but it didn’t cure anything. I wish I knew how they were getting through this evening. He’s going to be job hunting tomorrow. But he and his wife are a pair of mean Joses.”
    The women sat patiently through this maundering, then Joanie said, “Let’s go out there and look in their window and see how they’re getting along!” Frank shook his head, but June and Lucy shouted their support for the idea. Frank raised his hands to bring this to a stop but it had the opposite effect. He went into thekitchen to start coffee. Things were spinning along too fast. When he got back to the table they were deep into their plan of spying on the Jarrells. “What’s to become of this cowboy couple?” asked June. “Enquiring minds want to know.”
    “You got any fucking brandy?” asked Joanie. “Schnapps?”
    Frank doggedly hauled out the brandy, a pretty good cognac. They tossed it back without ceremony. They drank coffee too, which ought to have helped. He held out for a while but they got Jarrell’s name and conferred over the telephone book. “Here it is, and it’s a perfect address,” said Joanie with her finger on a page. “All cottonwoods along a creek. We can sneak around in there like real Indians.” Frank had a shot of brandy. This was going to be both exhilarating and mildly