I found Lydia stretched out on the fake cowhide couch, more or less surrounded by magazines and Dr Pepper bottles. An ashtray overflowed onto a deck of cards on the floor.
“Mom, we can’t stay here.”
“Mutual trust and respect, Sam, always remember what our relationship is based on. You must never fling in my face the fact that I am a mother.”
“These kids are morons, Mom. Lydia. Worse than morons, they’re Nazis. I almost killed myself today and they laughed. Can you believe it?”
“Children laugh at pain. It’s what makes them children.” Lydia lit a cigarette. I don’t know what kind. She made it a policy never to smoke two packs of the same brand in a row. She inhaled deeply and blew smoke at a huge stuffed moose head on the wall. When Lydia lifted her chin and squinted her eyes, her long forehead seemed to grow even longer, and her remarkably thin lips puckered into what I took as a pout. Lydia pointed at the moose with her middle finger under the cigarette. “That goes. I won’t have the dead passing for art.”
I collapsed on the foot end of the couch and kicked off my sneakers. “When we first came in yesterday, I figured out which room was the other side of the wall, and went looking for the rest of the moose.”
Lydia watched me through the light blue smoke cloud. “Most people don’t catch self-effacement, Sam. Try something else.”
I went in the kitchen and returned with two Dr Peppers. Lydia was still staring at the moose. The house had been rented to Caspar as is from a doctor who overemphasized Hemingway, which meant every room had at least one mounted head. Two antelopes flanked the bed in my room. I’d already named them Pushmi and Pullyu after two characters—one character, actually, with two heads—in a Dr. Doolittle book. The antelope on the left had longer horns that bent toward each other. He was Pushmi. I imagined Pullyu was a female.
I opened both bottles with a church key from under the sink. “Look at those nostrils. Each one’s big as a hooker’s twat.”
Lydia reached for her pop. “That’s another matter we should speak of. This is Wyoming. Thirteen-year-old boys do not compare objects to a hooker’s twat.”
“You’d rather me laugh at pain?”
“And how do you know what a hooker’s twat looks like?”
“Jesse told me they’re like a big, black, chocolate éclair.”
Lydia glanced down at herself. “I certainly don’t look like a chocolate eclair.”
“You’re not a hooker.”
Lydia propped her feet up on a pile of old Field & Streams. Cigarette in left hand, Dr Pepper in right, she looked considerably more like a bad baby-sitter than anyone’s mother. She had the toes of a child. “We must be normal here,” she said. “I’m tired of trouble. If these kids are morons, just wonder where Caspar will banish us if we mess this one.”
The thought was inconceivable. I plopped into a straight chair with elk gut or something stretched across the back. “Damn, Lydia, what did you do to hack him off so much?”
She waved her hand like brushing away flies. Lydia had the longest, thinnest fingers I had ever seen. “Nothing. I didn’t do a thing.”
“Look at it from my point of view. You told me about the Cuban guy and the dancer and the strip show on the diving board. If this one’s so horrible you can’t tell me, think what my imagination is going to imagine.”
Lydia smiled. “Oh, fuck you.”
I propped my feet up next to hers and drank from the bottle. “Normal, remember. Wyoming women don’t use that word in front of their baby boys.”
“Fuck Wyoming women too.”
I went back to the kitchen, opened the freezer, and pulled out a frozen pizza. “You know how to light the oven?”
“Are you kidding?”
The apprentices’ eyes widened in fear. “Chef Callahan,” they cried. “The hollandaise sauce is separating.”
Sam smiled mysteriously to himself and tapped his two-foot-high chef’s hat to a rakish angle. “Let’s see the problem, boys.”
The apprentices, both of whom were shorter than Chef Callahan, stepped aside as Sam peered into the stainless-steel bowl. “Boys, bring me two egg yolks, a half lemon, and a tennis racket.”
“Sam, something’s wrong with the television.”
I put the pizza back in the freezer and found a pound can of cashews and a half-full jar of pickles. Caspar’s doctor friend was big on Mexican condiments. The shelves were packed with four-alarm sauce stuff, dried peppers, and boxes of prefab taco shells, nothing you could make a meal of. Back in the living room, Lydia was sitting up, squinting at a snowy picture on the TV screen.
She slapped the side of the set. “Can you believe this, one channel, if you find this a picture.”
I set the cashews and pickles on the end table that had elk horns for legs. “Hope you don’t mind a light dinner.”
“I thought maybe PBS wouldn’t come through, but this is modern America. Everybody gets at least three stations.”
We chewed cashews and watched My Three Sons as Mike, Rob, and Chip pushed their dad’s busted Buick up the street. I wondered what it would be like to have brothers. Or a dad. “Maybe if we put in an antenna.”
“I doubt it. We’ve fallen off the edge of the Earth. My destruction is complete. You want the last pickle?”
I settled into my end of the couch with my knees over Lydia’s legs and A Farewell to Arms and the Hardy Boys Mystery of the Haunted Swamp on my leg. The guy in Farewell talked like an idiot, but the war parts were neat. Every time Frederic and Catherine started doing a Punch and Judy act—I love you, Catherine, I love you, Frederic—I switched to a half-hour of the Hardy brothers wholesomely sniffing out clues.
The red phone rang twice. Sam answered, “Yes, Mr. President.”
“Callahan, we’ve got a problem.”
“That’s what I’m here for, sir.”
“The Ruskies are filling Cuba with missiles and I just don’t know what to do.”
“Blockade them, sir.”
“That sounds awfully drastic, Callahan.”
“We must be firm, sir. The Red Menace doesn’t respect wimps.”
There was a long silence. “All right, by golly, we’ll try it. You’ve never let me down yet. Callahan, I have one other question.”
“My time is yours, sir.”
“Why don’t you let your mother and school chums know that you are the principal advisor to the President? Why let them go on believing you’re just another kid?”
“It’s my way of keeping in touch with the little people, sir.”
The cabin was so quiet it was noisy. The toilet ran, the refrigerator kicked on and off like a lawn mower, I opened the back door twice before figuring out the water heater knocked. By 9:30 I knew who was hiding in the swamp and what kind of wine went down in an Italian pool hall.
“Mom?”
Lydia ignored me.
“Lydia?”
“Yes, dear.”
“How can you go so long without peeing?”
“It’s a sign of the upper class.”
“You haven’t moved except to play with the TV in four hours that I know of. Why don’t you go to the bathroom like other people?”
Lydia lit another cigarette, a Lucky Strike this time. “Honey bunny, you read like a guy chasing whiskey with beer.”
Both books lay propped open, face up on my chest. “I like reading two books at once.”
She blew smoke at the moose. “You’re dead,” she said.
The moose stayed cool.
Lydia made her version of a sigh, which is more like the sound you get when you stick a knife in a full can of pop. “I’ve made a decision about this banishment deal, Sam.”
“Should I be told?”
“The way I conducted life back home didn’t work.”
“I’ll say.”
“I’m calling time out. No more connections for a while. I’m declaring myself a temporary emotional catatonic.”
I thought about this. “How’s a catatonic supposed to raise a son?”
Lydia looked down at her long fingers. “We’ll negotiate an arrangement.”
At 10:00 the news came on and we sat watching stories about people in east Idaho. Potatoes were important. Rangers in Grand Teton Park—which GroVont is smack in the middle of—were being plagued by elk poachers. Vice President Johnson was in Vietnam complaining about the food. During the sports, I didn’t recognize the names of any of the teams.
“It’s ten-thirty.”
Lydia smiled. “You mind?”
I went into the kitchen and brought back a pint of Gilbey’s gin and a two-ounce shot glass.
“You be all right?”
“Sure, I’m fine. I think I’ll sleep out here tonight and start unpacking in the morning.”
“I’m going to bed now.” I bent over and kissed her forehead. It was cool and slick. Her hand touched the back of my head.
“Your hair needs cutting.”
“Any barber around here’s going to make me look like one of them.”
“I’ll do it myself. It’ll be like we’re pioneers.”
I did the shower and toothbrush thing, ate a children’s multiple vitamin, snuck one of Lydia’s yellow Valiums, and put on my pajamas. I wore pajamas to bed back then. Before I flipped off my light and lay down to wait for the pill to kick in, I stood behind my open door, looking at Lydia through the crack.
She was at the window with the shot glass in her left hand and her right foot propped up on the sill. She stared out a long time. I could see the blank tightness on the side of her face, the twin knots on her neck, and a tiny throb on her temple visible clear across the room. She lifted her right hand and drew something in the fogginess her breath made on the window. I always wonder what she drew.
I had a dream that I was a fox and a bunch of uniformed people on horses chased me through a Southern hardwood forest.
Sam’s lungs cried out with the pain of charging headlong down the steep hillside. He tripped over a rotting log and sprawled onto his face. Rolling over quickly, he made it to his knees and crawled through the thick, thorny underbrush and into a weed-choked stream.
He turned west, splashing through the frigid water, using his paws and legs to pull himself upstream. Sam heard the dogs running up and down the bank, baying to each other and their wicked masters. Horses thrashed through the trees. He’d fooled them for the moment. Now to find a safe hole. He waded around a corner and came face to face with the blue-eyed Hitler girl astride a giant, sneering bay. She laughed and raised the rifle to her shoulder.