Free Nothing but Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane

on you, but if you weren’t angry, you were hurt.”
    “Then I was angry, but I’m not angry now.”
    Some hours ago, he thought, she was chewing sheets and going “Oof, oof, oof!” while, evidently, I was going, “Oh, Gracie, oh, Gracie!” Quite a picture. Oh, dear.
    Then she smiled and said, “This time, I’m not sending you anywhere.” The air had apparently cleared. Frank left her office, thinking, What a nice person.
    Frank straightened up his desk and went back out through the reception area. “I’m going to the ranch,” he said.
    “Can you be reached there?” asked Eileen.
    “No, but I’ll be back.”
    Frank drove north out of town, cutting through the subdivisions that lay around the old town center. Frank had a reluctant affection for these suburbs, with their repetitious shapes and lawns and basketball hoops and garages. He appreciated their regularity.
    The road wound up through dryland farms of oats and malting barley, golden blankets in the middle of sagebrush country, toward the tall brown of snowy mountains. The city had almost disappeared behind him, yet from the front gate of the home place he could still make it out. A bright serration against the hills.
    Frank stopped right in front of the house where his family once lived, a substantial farmhouse with a low, deep porch across the entire front, white with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof.The house sat on a fieldstone cellar with deep-set airyway windows at regular intervals beneath the porch. The house was locked up. In front, the tall hollyhocks his grandmother had taken such care of stood up boldly through the quack grass and competed along the border of the porch with the ocher shafts of henbane. The junipers hadn’t been trimmed and streaks of brown penetrated their dark green masses. It was a fine old house that gave Frank the creeps.
    He drove slowly past it toward the barn and outbuildings, looking for Boyd Jarrell, his hired man. He had already seen Jarrell’s truck from the house, and when he crossed the cattle guard into the equipment compound, he watched Jarrell walk past the granary without looking up at Frank’s car. He saw that Jarrell would be in a foul mood, and felt a slight sinking in his stomach. Boyd liked Mike but didn’t like Frank. Mike came out here and played rancher with Boyd, building fence on the weekends or irrigating, and in general dignifying Boyd’s job by doing an incompetent imitation of it. Frank could never understand why this would ingratiate Mike to Boyd, but he guessed it was a form of tribute.
    Frank parked the car and walked toward the granary. Jarrell now crossed the compound going the other way, carrying an irrigating shovel and a length of tow chain over his shoulder.
    “Boyd,” Frank called, and Jarrell stopped, paused and looked over at Frank. “Have you got a minute?”
    “I might.”
    Frank walked over to him.
    “I spoke to Lowry Equipment on Friday,” said Frank, “and the loader’s fixed on the tractor. So, that’s ready to go whenever you need it.”
    “If that’s all it was.”
    “That’s right. But I assume it’s okay.”
    Jarrell looked away and smiled. Frank let it fall silent for a minute.
    “I’ve got a buyer to look at our calves on Monday.”
    “I hope he can find them.”
    Frank looked at Jarrell. Jarrell had him by fifty pounds and ten years. But he had put down his mark.
    “He’ll find them,” Frank said. “You’ll take him to them. Or you’ll get out.”
    Frank turned to go to his car.
    “Fuck you, Copenhaver,” he heard Jarrrell say, like a concussion or a huge sneeze, and Frank kept walking. He heard Jarrell walk up behind him, and in a moment Frank’s hat was slapped off his head. He bent to pick it up, then kept going to his car. Jarrell laughed and went to his truck, parked alongside the barn.
    Frank stopped, then turned. He went back to where Jarrell stood. “Why did you do that, Boyd?”
    “Because I don’t like people telling me