Rule Number One of Being Sam Callahan: In times of torment, fly to Maurey. The evening after Halloween, All Souls’ Night itself, I landed in the Jackson Hole Airport during the first real snowstorm of the year. Because the flight attendant thought I was handicapped, she helped me down the airplane steps and across the runway to the terminal where Hank Elkrunner awaited. I did feel arthritic, especially in the knees and feet. The world looked the way I imagine it would if you’d just survived a plane crash where other people were killed. Objects appeared brand new; I couldn’t come up with the word that went along with the thing.
Hank said, “Welcome home.”
I said, “Oh.”
He drove to the ranch through blowing snow and no heat in his pickup. On the radio, Jimmy Buffett sang “Peanut Butter Conspiracy”—a song glorifying shoplifting. At the ranch, Hank led me to my private cell in the barracks he and Pud built years ago for Maurey’s recovering legions. Without undressing, I crawled between the sheets of a twin bed and lay on my back, neither awake nor asleep. The plywood ceiling had knot whorls in the wood grain that stared down at me like eyes. Pissed-off, judgmental eyes. Female eyes.
Maurey came through the door. She felt my forehead and took off my shoes. “You look like a wreck,” she said.
“I am a wreck.”
“You’re in the right place, I’m a tow truck.”
I closed my eyes, too tired for metaphors.
Every now and then I got up to pee, which meant going outside in the snow and around the building. Twice each day a pregnant teenager who told me her name was Toinette brought food. You can take it as a gauge of how far into my hole I’d sunk that I felt no curiosity as to how and when Toinette became pregnant.
On the third day, Maurey showed up at my bedside, straddling a chair backward, like a cowboy.
She said, “My brother is dying, his lover is losing a lover. I’ve got a pregnant girl disowned by her family and a little boy so traumatized he can’t speak.”
I pulled the sheet over my mouth; she reached across and yanked it back down.
“And you,” she said, “are the only person on the ranch who feels sorry for yourself.”
“Auburn can’t talk?”
“Auburn’s fine.” She knocked wood on the chair. “Roger can’t talk.”
“Who’s Roger?”
“Long story. Are you going to get up or waste away?”
“What about the recovering junkie?” I asked.
“What?”
“When we talked on the phone you had a recovering junkie.”
“He stopped recovering and left.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Win some, lose some. The deal is, you’re the lone refugee out here not pulling your weight in the cheerfulness department.”
“Are you cheerful?” She looked worn out. The veins showed in her arms and her eyes crinkled like she’d been outside too much without sunglasses.
“Fuck, no, I’m not cheerful. Helping family die is hard work, but I’m faking it like a champ, and I can’t do this unless you fake it too.”
I sat up. “You want me to fake being cheerful?”
Maurey’s blue eyes glistened, but she didn’t cry. “I need you, Sam. You’ve got to get up and help me.”
So I did. All I needed was someone to need me.
Mornings, Maurey drove or snowmobiled the boys six miles down to their bus stop while Hank hitched a team of half-breed draft horses to the hay sled, which he skidded around the pasture with Pud and me on back, throwing hay to a herd of forty horses and a half dozen semi-tame elk. I couldn’t help but wonder what Gaylene and Shirley would say if they saw me feeding horses with horses. The TM Ranch was a long way from Callahan Golf Carts, in more than distance.
After feeding, I went back to bed with a carafe of coffee and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Emma Bovary was the sort of woman I once would have found ripe for adultery—bored silly. So desperate for attention that she’ll risk all for one interesting night. I have now sworn off the Emma Bovarys of the world.
I generally took a short nap after lunch, then strapped on the cross-country skis and shuffled up Miner Creek to the warm springs and back. This time segment was set aside for self-flagellation. Going up the hill I pined for Gilia, at the warm springs itself I dwelt on my shameful conduct toward Clark and Atalanta, and coming down I mourned my wasted talent as a novelist—the theory being the best way of coming to terms with guilt is to wallow in it.
Maurey gave me a choice between cooking supper and the daily cleaning of the stud stall. Food won’t stomp you to death, so I chose supper. Cooking can be quite pleasant when it’s cold outside and you’re in a warm place that smells good. As I chopped and blended, Toinette sat in the family room or den or whatever it was called and played her viola. She warmed up with scales and finger exercises, then she practiced Irish Rhapsody by Victor Herbert—“We Roam Through the World” and “My Lodgings on the Cold Ground.” The viola parts weren’t something you’d whistle along with, but they made the day nicer.
Toinette had come from Belgium to Jackson Hole to play in our summer symphony. Under the full moon in the Tetons, she surrendered to love—Maurey suspects a percussionist—and a child was conceived. I can relate to that. When Toinette telephoned Papa he called her a whore in Flemish, French, and English and told her not to come home. He said, From this day forward my daughter is dead. The jerk.
Dinner was a sitcom written by Edgar Allan Poe.
Afterward, Pud and the boys cleaned up. I carried my decaf into the family room and looked through catalogs or read Zane Grey by the wood-burning heater while Chet and Pete played Scrabble and Toinette watched French-language TV off the Canadian satellite. Some nights, during old movies, I watched with her. The strange language wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as seeing Jimmy Stewart open his mouth and speak in a totally non-Jimmy Stewart voice.
By ten-thirty I was back in bed with Madame Bovary.
The third day after I got out of bed, I came in from my afternoon ski and guilt orgy to find Maurey in the kitchen, aiming a hypodermic syringe at the ceiling. Pete sat on a stool beside the wood-block table, playing gin rummy with Chet. I checked out the score; Pete was way ahead.
“Where’d you learn to give shots?” I asked Maurey.
She tapped the syringe barrel with her index fingernail. “You’d be amazed how many doctors are alcoholic.”
“I doubt it.”
“They come here to start recovery and I make them teach me things. Who you think will deliver Toinette’s baby if it comes during a blizzard?”
I opened the refrigerator to pull out a bottle of cranberry juice and perused the options for supper—leftover corned beef and applesauce.
Pete said, “Gin.”
Chet said, “Hell.” He gathered in the loose cards and shuffled. Chet was an adept card shuffler, which is a skill I’ve never been able to pick up. My shuffles tend to explode across the table.
“Roll up your sleeve,” Maurey said to Pete.
As Pete rolled his sleeve up over his mop-handle-thin arm, he turned on the stool to face me. “Maurey says you’re paying my doctor bills.”
I shrugged and drank juice straight from the bottle. It embarrasses me when people act like I’m being generous for giving away bits of the Callahan family fortune. I never did anything to deserve it, except being born.
“Thank you,” Pete said.
“We’re family,” I said. “Family sticks together.”
Pete continued staring at me, like he used to when he was ten and wanted to drive me crazy. I tried to look back at him, but it was difficult. He breathed with his mouth open and his gums were swollen to the point of cracking. His skin was a translucent yellow green, like zucchini pulp, and he’d lost so much weight the bones around his temples stood out from his face.
Chet slapped the deck on the table. “Cut.”
Pete said, “Sam, you and I have never liked each other.” It was a quiet statement of fact, not an accusation.
I said, “You were God’s own brat as a child, but since you turned fifteen or so, I’ve liked you.”
Maurey swabbed Pete’s upper arm with rubbing alcohol. The smell filled the room.
“But I haven’t liked you,” Pete said.
“That’s too bad. Why not?”
“To start with, you’re homophobic.”
“I like gay guys as much as the other kind.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Maurey said.
“What else?” I asked.
“Your mother was a snob to my mother.”
“My mother is a snob to everyone—even me. Especially me. It’s not fair to turn on a person because they have snotty parents. What else?”
He blinked twice, thinking. “You knocked up my sister when she was thirteen.”
I held up one hand like a cop stopping traffic. “She made me do it. Have you ever tried saying no to Maurey?”
Maurey pinched loose skin on Pete’s upper arm. “He’s right, Pete. I seduced him. Poor little Sam didn’t know the first thing about sex.”
“That’s not exactly true,” I said.
“You thought you could make a girl pregnant with a French kiss.”
No one ever got anywhere correcting Maurey’s view of history, so I went back to Pete. “There’s enough people in the world with good reason to dislike me, Pete, but you’re not one of them. I’d be real happy if I could call myself your friend.”
He smiled, showing much more of his swollen, bleeding gums. “Okay,” he said, “let’s kiss and make up.”
My face must have shown terror because Chet and Maurey went into hoots of glee. Even Pete laughed. I don’t mind being the butt of a joke if it relieves tension.
“Instead of kissing, how about if I deal you in,” Chet said.
“Great.”
But it never happened. As Chet dealt, Maurey sank the needle into what was left of Pete’s muscle. He picked up his cards and studied them a moment, then his eyes turned dull, his chin dropped to his chest, and the cards in his hand fluttered to the floor. Gently Chet helped Pete walk into the bedroom.
Over the weeks, I got to know Chet fairly well. While Pete rested in the afternoons, Chet would come into the kitchen, sit at the block table, and smoke cigarettes while I cooked. Chet was tall with reddish blond hair. You could tell from how he smiled sometimes that he was basically a pretty happy person, or would have been if his partner hadn’t got sick. He and Pete had met working lights at some theater in New York, Off Broadway, and Chet liked to talk about plays and who was hot and who was gliding on their past glory. He gave me the scoop on which actors were gay. A couple amazed me.
The only visible difference between Chet and the hetero males on the ranch was Chet tucked in his shirttail.
Hank and Maurey both hassled me for refusing to see Lydia.
“She’s your mother,” Maurey said.
“I’ve heard her deny that, many a time.”
“She was young then. Now, she’ll admit she has a child to almost anyone.”
“She ruined my life.”
“Everybody’s mother ruins their life. That doesn’t mean you can blow her off.”
“Watch me.”
Hank said Lydia wanted to apologize and reconcile our differences.
“Did she say that?”
“Not in words, but I know your mother. She never says what she feels in words.”
“You mean she lies.”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Lydia doesn’t lie, exactly. She expects you to see behind what she says.”
A letter came from Gilia.
Sam Callahan,
You did a rotten thing. It hurt. I don’t know which is worse, screwing Mrs. Prescott or running away. You could have at least given me the satisfaction of telling you to go to hell.
Dad gave me a set of the photographs of you and Katrina. I told him he is as despicable as you are, which is a lot. I haven’t had much luck with men in my life.
Speaking of Katrina, she and Skip are now the lovey-dovey couple of the South. They neck in public. She compares their love to that of Prince Charles and Lady Di. Yesterday, I heard Katrina telling a table full of trust fund widows at the club that you date-raped her. It made me so mad, I walked over and threw the photo of you and her on the table—you know the one where you have a pom-pom on your penis and she has you tied to the wall. I said, “Does that look like date rape?”
Sam, you’re the only person who ever let me act like myself. I wish you hadn’t turned out to be such a dip-shit.
Sincerely,
Gilia
Paper-clipped to the letter was the Greensboro Record “Births and Deaths” column from November 1, 1983. Midway down the births, Gilia had highlighted in yellow Magic Marker:
Sam Lynn Paseneaux, a boy, 8 lbs., 1 oz., born to Babs
Paseneaux and Sam Callahan.
Sammi Babs Norloff, a girl, 6 lbs., 5 oz., born to Lynette
Norloff and Sam Callahan.
In the margin, she had drawn a yellow exclamation point followed by a question mark—!?
I had no contact with Callahan Magic Golf Carts. They didn’t need me. I called my lawyer to set up rent payments for Babs and Lynette and to get started hurling counter injunctions at Wanda.
“I’ll pay ten thousand dollars to make certain she doesn’t get a penny.”
“We can do that,” my lawyer said.
Maurey overheard the conversation. Her comment was “Getting vindictive in our old age, aren’t we?”
“I’m a man of principles.”
“That’s the nice word for it.”
My only other conversation with anyone in North Carolina came after Thanksgiving dinner, when Shannon telephoned.
She asked, “Are you well yet?”
“No.”
“Are you better?”
“I don’t think in qualitative terms.”
“Wanda tried to move in the other day.”
“Good Lord.”
“She brought two guys with tattoos and a pickup truck full of stuff. Gus blocked the door and wouldn’t let them in.”
“How’d Wanda handle it?”
“She cussed worse than I ever heard anyone cuss. She waved a tire iron in Gus’s face and screamed, ‘Nigger!’ Then she ordered the two guys to beat her up.”
“Two guys with tattoos are no match for Gus.”
“I sure am glad I never called Wanda Mama.”
I looked over at Maurey, who was making cowboy cappuccino. She would enjoy this story. “What’d you and Eugene do?”
“I ran around and locked the other doors and windows. Eugene took notes. He wants to write his thesis on my family.”
We chitchatted a few minutes, or Shannon chitchatted while I counted the number of holes in Maurey’s phone mouthpiece—eighteen.
Shannon said, “Gilia and her parents aren’t speaking to each other, so she spends the night here sometimes. We have a lot in common.”
There was a long silence while I searched for a detail to study.
“Gilia Saunders,” she said.
I guess she wanted a comment. I couldn’t even breathe, much less comment.
“She and I are going to New York City over Spring Break. She wants to take me shopping and to art galleries and all that stuff you never would do with me.”
I stared at the turkey remains on the table. Hank had gone to town to be with Lydia, and Pete only ate some dressing and gravy before lying down, but the six of us who remained had pretty much left the carcass in tatters.
I said, “That’s nice of Gilia.”
“We drove down to see Clark Gaines. He’s back home now. He said to say ‘hello.’”
“I have to hang up now.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“Thank you.”
Dear Babs and Lynette,
Enclosed you will find two envelopes addressed to Gilia Saunders of 16 Corner Creek Drive in Greensboro. Would each of you mind dropping her a note explaining my relationship to Sam and Sammi and why my name is on the birth certificates instead of the real fathers?
This favor will save me from much groveling.
Yours,
Sam Callahan
Dear Gilia,
I’m surprised to hear that you don’t know which is worse—what I did with Katrina Prescott or running away afterward. I ran because I had hurt you, I had confirmed all your worst opinions of men, and I didn’t think you wanted to hear my excuses. Not that there are any. I told myself someday I would make a commitment to you and after that I would be true from now on, but in the meantime, it didn’t matter what I did. That, of course, is a lie. Wanting to love someone means loving them now. Or not at all.
I went cross-country skiing today. The snow was beautiful and cold. As I skied, I thought about why I was a dipshit to you, and here, near as I can see, is it:
Before we met I had two wives and an uncountable number of relationships, ranging from twenty minutes to four months, and every woman had this in common—she was desperate. I thought a woman had to be a drunk, crazy, extraordinarily young, unhappily married, or in big trouble before she would want me. She had to need what I have to give—sex and money. I thought no one desirable could love me. I married women I knew it wouldn’t hurt to lose.
Then I met you, and you are desirable. You don’t need me. We simply have fun being together and that scared me so much I had trouble breathing. When you have something that matters, you have something to lose.
Katrina couldn’t touch me, so I slept with her. You could touch me, so I drove you away. And I regret it. And I am sorry.
Sam
Pete relapsed in early December. One evening he was tireder than usual and the next morning he didn’t get out of bed. Maurey, Chet, and a doctor floated in and out of Maurey and Pud’s old bedroom with exaggerated quietness and muffled tones. No one said it aloud, but the general feeling was this time was for keeps.
It was Tuesday, six days before Christmas. Maurey’s son, Auburn, and Roger, who can’t or won’t speak, sat perched on a board, solemnly watching me flake hay off bales. Behind the boys, I could see Hank Elkrunner’s ponytail and part of his right wrist, which snapped up and down as he turned the team toward the Gros Ventre River Road.
“Too fast,” Auburn shouted. “Gristle will hog it all.”
Gristle had two white feet and massive dingleberries hanging off her butt, and she’d appointed herself herd bully. Whenever I came near the equine bitch she would pull her lips off her teeth and lean toward my face. Hank said she smelled my fear, but I think she just enjoyed biting people.
“Let’s shoot her for bear bait,” I said. Auburn’s face turned scared. He can’t tell when I’m kidding yet, so he tends to take me literally, which sure as hell isn’t how I care to be taken.
“Maybe I could read the others Winning Through Intimidation,” I said. I looked at Roger and winked, but his expression didn’t change. The boy’s expression never changed. Always the impassive observer. We weren’t sure how old Roger was, but he looked younger than Auburn, who was soon to turn twelve. Roger had the eyes of a person considerably older and more world-weary than any of us, and that’s saying a lot.
I slid the X-Acto knife under the bale twine and cut up, toward my face. The loose string went into a potato sack at my feet, then, as forty or so horses led by the selfish nag Gristle shuffled in our path, I shoved layers of lime-green-and-yellow grass onto the tracked-over snow. Way off to the south, the sun shone weakly through a smattering of high clouds. Up by the ranch buildings, aspens stood against the hill like gangly white skeletons with oozing joints, while in creases along the foothills spruce and lodgepole pine made a kelly green mosaic on the snow, and way off alone an occasional limber pine declared its independence from everyone—animal or plant.
The propriety of the whole scene kind of got to me, like I was an important piece of a huge jigsaw puzzle or a character in an Amish movie. Working outdoors in weather will do that sometimes—give you the feeling of being minutely small yet still consequential.
I looked at the fenceline and saw 1966. Wyoming women. Broad shoulders, flat bellies, unafraid to look men in the eye. My Dodgers won the pennant, lost the World Series. That summer I’d gotten downwind of a grass fire in Curtis Canyon and the smoke stayed in my nose for weeks, so wherever I went I swore the immediate vicinity was smoldering. I slept with a shovel under the bed. I asked a girl named Tracy Goodman on a date and she said “Okay,” but when I went to pick her up she’d gone shopping in Idaho Falls. I often dreamed of winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and when I stood at the podium to give my speech I would start out, “Eat shit, Tracy Goodman.”
Auburn’s voice cut through my vision. “Earth to Sam. Earth to Sam.”
Maurey taught him to say that and he thinks it’s hilarious. He turned to rap Hank on the shoulder. “Sam’s left his body again.”
Hank glanced back at me. “Tell Sam to close his mouth so his spirit can’t escape while he’s gone.”
“Close your mouth so your spirit can’t escape—”
“I heard him, Auburn.”
Maurey doesn’t mind, but Lydia throws a fit when Hank talks about turning into a bird and flying around the universe in front of Auburn. She’s afraid Auburn will take him seriously, which Hank says is the point.
“I was daydreaming,” I said.
Hank gave his Blackfeet chuckle. “Bad practice to daydream with a knife in your hand. It may bite you.”
Auburn laughed and I pretended to. What I actually did was block thoughts of Lydia by studying a lone raven flying toward the red hills across the river.
Hank said, “Pud’s coming.”
Pud’s white van with the Talbot Satellite Dish Systems Repair magnetic sign on the passenger door picked its way through the ruts and slush. We’re always the last county road plowed, so the ice base forms thickest, and when a rare December warm spell comes along it’s like driving through Dairy Queen soft ice cream. Takes four-wheel drive and the faith to keep moving no matter what. Those who stop may not start again.
Hank angled the team—Luci and Desi—toward a semi-solid meeting place along the fence, where Pud wrestled the wheel until the van came to rest against the far snowbank. He opened the door and sat with his legs out of the van, waiting for us to skid up to the fence, then he hefted himself to the ground and crossed over the ruts.
Pud Talbot wears cowboy boots year-round and a yellow cap that reads Dash Roustabout Service. He’s no taller than me and has the famous chin that marks all the Talbots except Auburn. Pud’s brother Dothan is Auburn’s father, and I’m afraid I’ve allowed the deep animosity—read that as hatred—that runs between Dothan and me to color my feelings for Pud. Also Pud sleeps with Maurey, and whether Maurey and I have a brother-sister deal or first-lover nostalgia or we’re simply best friends for life, my chosen role is to quietly resent anyone who sticks himself into her body.
Luci and Desi shuffled to the fence and stopped, and us five males waited there a moment in the winter silence, which is so much more silent than summer silence there ought to be a different word for it.
Pud put one boot up on the snowbank and said, “Pete died.”
I looked away from Pud to the horses with their necks down, eating hay.
Hank said, “The doctors told us he had another month.”
“The doctors missed the call,” Pud said.
More silence. A white mare raised her head and stared directly at me. I couldn’t meet her eyes.
“How’re Maurey and Chet taking it?” Hank asked.
“About how you’d expect. They’ll be along in a couple hours.”
For some reason, I turned to look at Roger. His eyes were huge and terrified, like a panicked deer. His mouth opened and he screamed.
The secret to cornbread is in the oil. I would have used lard if I thought I could get away with it, but like everybody else in the drugs-and-alcohol generation, Maurey’s gone health crazy. As it was, I spooned a couple glops of Crisco into the ten-inch Dutch oven and stuck the Dutch oven in the real oven set at 350 degrees. Oil started, I pried the lid off the ceramic crock of sourdough starter that according to legend was brought across the Missouri River in 1881 by Maurey’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. I’d be willing to bet the crock hadn’t been washed since 1881. A thumb’s-width of dry dough skin ringed the lip of the crock like the rubber seal on a gasket.
I measured two dippers of starter into a 1950s Art Deco bowl and broke in four eggs, double what the recipe called for. Then I went to the refrigerator for buttermilk, where I mused for about the eightieth time that no one drinks straight buttermilk these days and it seems more than a change of style but a degradation of American values. Wasn’t that long ago you knew you could trust a man who drank buttermilk.
Toinette’s viola music filtered comfortably in from the next room. At the kitchen table, Roger and Auburn played a silent game of Risk. Roger’s scream hadn’t been one of those painful breakthroughs where the victim flashes onto what was repressed and starts talking again. From outward appearances, he didn’t seem affected by his foray into the world of sound. He knelt in the chair on his knees, leaning forward toward the game board, concentrating on pushing blue armies back and forth across the continents.
Auburn also adopted the quiet method of warfare. Roger’s coming to the ranch had been nothing but good for Auburn. He stopped whining at chores and his picky eating habits disappeared practically overnight. Childishness no longer washes when you’re paired off with a true survivor.
Maurey’s friend Mary Beth dropped Roger off at the TM a few days before my own arrival. Mary Beth said two men showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, and when they left the boy stayed, and she didn’t know what to do with him, so she brought him to Maurey. His father—who a long time ago was Mary Beth’s boyfriend—had been killed in Nicaragua running drugs or guns or something else horrible. Mary Beth mentioned slavery. She didn’t know how long Roger had been quiet. They thought he might be the half brother of Maurey’s artist friend who lives in Paris, but even that wasn’t certain. Maurey and Pud checked Roger over for scars and lice and no one had physically left marks on the boy, but one look in his soft brown eyes and it was clear he’d been through something that children shouldn’t go through.
I lowered the heat on the huge pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. Mealtimes the next few days were bound to be off kilter, so it seemed a good idea to have something continuously ready. Freud could go to town on why I chose chicken soup, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t care what my motives were. I pulled the Dutch oven from the oven and carefully poured oil into the starter mix. This was the point where twice before I burned the bejesus out of myself. The rest was basically unskilled labor—mix in the whole wheat flour, cornmeal, salt, baking powder, baking soda. I had a box of sugar hidden in the pot-holder drawer. Maurey called sugar white death, but she made an exception for my cornbread.
Roger’s face jerked toward the dark window and his eyes widened and a moment later headlights flashed on the log gate out by the road. I opened the oven door with the toes of my left foot and fondled in the cornbread. In the yard, the Suburban engine coughed, doors slammed, boots knocked snow off against the porch.
Then Maurey was in the kitchen, hugging me. I felt her face on my neck. I patted the thick hair on the back of her head and smelled her jojoba shampoo. She cried a few seconds, less than a minute, as I looked across at Chet, standing inside the door with his hands at his side. Toinette’s music stopped and she appeared at the other door, bow in hand.
Maurey pulled away and looked at my face. We’re almost the same height.
She said, “Life is the shits.”
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. Thanks for being here.” She moved off to hug Toinette.
I stepped toward Chet, then stopped, raised a hand, lowered it. I smiled a weak I-mean-well smile, and he smiled back “I know. It’s okay.”
There was more boot kicking at the front door before Pud and Hank came in. They must have been in the bunkhouse, waiting. Hank certainly wasn’t shy about touching Chet. They bear-hugged like athletes. Pud held Maurey. Toinette looked sad and pregnant. Auburn carefully kept his eyes off the adults, but Roger was a camera. I got the definite feeling he could see right through emotions, that he knew every coloration of every relationship in the room—whose love was pure and whose tainted by self-interest—and I failed the test.
Chet hung his coat on the deer antler rack by the door. “I need to use the phone,” he said. “There’s friends in New York…”
Maurey broke from a muffled conversation with Pud. She said, “Use the one in our room,” meaning Hank’s old room, where she and Pud moved when Pete needed a bed. Maurey looked at me and said, “Come help me pick out Pete’s clothes.”
“I was fixing to make dumplings.”
“Dumplings can wait.”
I gave Toinette instructions on when to pull out the corn-bread, then I followed my friend into her dead brother’s room. I found her sitting on the dead brother’s bed, staring glumly into the dead brother’s open closet doors.
“Did you know it’s illegal to cremate a body naked?” she said.
“That’s not something I’ve thought about too often.”
“You have to buy a coffin, too.”
“I guess the funeral homes were afraid they’d lose money when burial went out of style.”
“Why didn’t you disagree with me when I said life is the shits?”
I almost had disagreed, but we were making such nice eye contact I couldn’t spoil it. “Didn’t seem like the time to argue,” I said.
Maurey pooched her lower lip the way Shannon does when she doesn’t get her way. “Life isn’t the shits,” she said. “Life is fun; it’s all this death that’s the shits.”
I sat on the bed beside her. “It’s not death either. It’s loving people who die.”
She doubled up her fists. “Death is boring. Boring, boring, boring. I hate death. It ruins everything.” She looked at me fiercely. “You better not die on me.”
“I won’t if I can help it.”
“Just don’t.” She started to cry again.
I took her hands and unclenched the fists, then held them. We sat silently, remembering other deaths.
“The doctors said he had another month,” I said.
“Doctors say whatever they think you want to hear. That’s why so many of them drink—they can’t stand themselves.”
“Roger screamed when he heard about Pete.”
Maurey looked at me. “Aloud?”
“You wouldn’t believe how loud. I was hoping he would talk after that, but he clammed right back up. I don’t think he even remembers screaming.”
Maurey extracted her hands from mine and looked down at her palms. She has extremely small hands. Twenty years of working outdoors had left them tough. “He’s been stealing food.”
“Roger?”
“He hides rolls and cheese in his box springs. I found half a chicken in the laundry bag.”
Maurey blinked quickly and her voice caught on a sob sound. “I can’t do anything for him, Sam. I say, ‘Bring me your dried-up drunks, your abused babies, all those lost souls,’ but I can’t do a damn thing for any of them. I let my own brother die.”
I waited a while and said, “You helped me.”
“You don’t need help. You need someone to convince you you’re not a jerk.”
So that was it. “You’re not a savior.”
“That makes us even.” She laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of a person amused. “Now, if you were dead, what would you want to be cremated in?”
I thought. “My Los Angeles Dodgers boxer shorts.”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Pete doesn’t even own boxer shorts. Didn’t.”
We chose a light blue Van Heusen shirt with short sleeves and a three-tone sweater Pete and Maurey’s mom knitted while she was in rehab. One look at the sweater and you knew the creator was schizophrenic.
“Nobody’ll see it,” Maurey said. “Pete didn’t want a viewing.”
She chose a pair of white slacks and I accidentally said I wouldn’t be caught dead in those. That got Maurey giggly, which happens to distraught people. Hysteria means the same thing with either laughter or tears.
I wanted Pete to wear dress J. Chisholm cowboy boots; Maurey couldn’t see wasting a pair of boots.
“Pud can have them, he and Petey are the same shoe size.”
“Pud doesn’t want boots off a dead guy, even if Pete was your brother.”
“Is.”
“Why do women always give away dead people’s clothes?”
“Bodies in caskets are barefoot. Everybody knows that.”
“That’s an eighth-grade myth. They’re not going to put a suit on someone and leave off the shoes.”
“Pete asked that you give his eulogy.”
“Oh, Lord.”
Nausea came on so fast I sat down. I clutched the boots to my chest, smelling the leather smell that carried a hint of aftershave. He must have packed toiletries in the boots to save room in his suitcase. The thought of standing up in front of a bunch of mourners and saying “Here’s what Pete’s life meant” scared the wadding out of me. I can’t sum up a person. It’s in my genes that whenever I try to be sincere I come off shallow. The mourners would look up at me and think glib.
“Why not you or Chet?” I asked.
“He didn’t want to put us through that.”
“And he did me?”
She smiled—like a cat. “You writers are supposed to be good with words.”
Pete’s pillow still had sweat stains where his head had lain. You could make out the form of his body in the mattress.
“This is his way of getting back at me for being heterosexual,” I said.
“I’d say it’s more like Pete’s last joke.”
“He always had a dry sense of humor.”
Maurey held a beaded Arapaho belt up to the mirror. “You’ll do it, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
She smiled at me in the mirror. “You think this belt goes with white slacks?”
Pud knocked at the open door. “Telephone for you guys.”
I said, “Someone called us?”
“Not exactly.”
“This is a trick to get me and Lydia talking.”
“It’s your daughter.” Pud looked at Maurey. “Yours too. Hank telephoned her with the news about Pete and she wants to talk to both of you. Sam first.”
I said, “I understand,” even though I didn’t.
There was a phone in Pete’s room. I sat on the bed with it in my hand and one finger holding down the button, preparing myself to communicate. You have to be ready for these things. I’d missed Shannon terribly the last few weeks, but still, talking to her would be difficult. She knew about Katrina Prescott, Gilia, Atalanta, Clark Gaines, Lydia, and everything else I was ashamed of. Lydia had disappointed me so often when I was young, I’d sworn never to disappoint my daughter, and now I’d gone and done it, big time.
I released the button and said, “Hi.”
Hank went through the good-byes and take cares, then it was just Shannon and me.
She said, “I’m sorry about Uncle Pete.”
“He was a nice man.”
“I’d like to come to the funeral.”
I hadn’t expected that. “He wanted to be cremated.”
“That’s what Hank said.”
“It’s illegal to cremate a body naked.”
Shannon coming to the funeral felt strange. Somehow, I had the idea that North Carolina was way down there and Wyoming way up here and I was the only one allowed to cross between them. I like keeping my separate lives separate.
“Can I come?” she asked.
“Of course you can come. I don’t know what day the funeral is.”
“Friday.”
“Hank told you?”
“He said Thursday is too soon for arrangements and they didn’t want it on Christmas Eve or Day because that would spoil Christmases from now on.”
“That’s true.”
“So I can catch a flight out tomorrow.”
“Put the ticket on my Visa.” I counted to ten. “And bring Eugene if you want to.”
Shannon must have counted to ten also; it took that long before she answered. “Eugene dumped me.”
I held the phone with both hands. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
The worst thing a parent can say at this point is I told you so, yet, “I told you he was a swine.”
Her voice was flat. “Eugene is okay. He just can’t handle my family.”
Hell—more guilt. “Eugene left because of me?”
“You were part of it, but Lydia mailed him a thermos jug of buffalo balls.”
Good for Lydia. She’d done the same thing to me after I married Wanda, and Hank told me she had him put together similar packages for Wyoming’s two Republican senators. The balls meant something symbolic to her. I never bothered to ask what.
“Lydia scared off a few of my girlfriends too,” I said.
“Eugene wants children someday; he said our family shouldn’t procreate.”
The pompous bastard. “You’re better off without him,” I said, even though I shouldn’t have.
“It still hurts.” I didn’t say anything. Shannon added, “He has impotency issues to deal with anyway. He’s almost thirty.”
Wasn’t much I could say to that one.
“Gilia’s here,” Shannon said.
“Oh.”
“You want to talk to her?”
Gilia. Sweet, big-boned Gilia. The lifeline I had cut off. “I better not.”
“C’mon, Daddy. If I can get her to talk to you will you talk back?”
“It’s your mom’s turn. I’ll go find her.”
“I’m right here,” Maurey said.
“You were on the extension? Some might call that bad manners.”
“Bad manners is not talking to the girl, Sam.”
“I’m getting off now. You and Shannon can trash me in private.”
Is it unnatural when your masturbation fantasy is a fictional character from the nineteenth century? Maurey says I waste time worrying about what is natural and what isn’t. At some point in my low twenties, I looked at myself as others see me and realized I’m odd, and since then I’ve held my actions and thoughts up to a normalcy standard. Normalcy is hard to standardize. I mean, is it abnormal to fantasize licking Madame Bovary between the thighs as we pass through the dark streets of Rouen in a carriage pulled by matching palomino stallions? And, when does abnormalcy become perversion? We all agree it would be perverted to go down on a 127-year-old woman in a public conveyance, but is it equally perverted to lie on your bunk in the mountain silence and fantasize to the point of holographic hallucination?
While working on the Bucky books, I often dream about sex with Samantha Lindell. We do it the normal way—crotch to crotch. She lifts her feet onto my shoulders like the women in Chinese erotica. She whispers “My man” in my ear.
Since Halloween, I was no longer part of my own dreams. Emma Bovary did it with some hairy-backed geek I never saw before. Or pioneers fought off waves of attacking Cubans. Guys in white suits murdered children. But I wasn’t the murderer or the one being murdered. I was a movie audience with access to varied camera angles and hidden microphones. What I couldn’t do was touch or be heard or influence actions. The effect was disassociative.
The night Pete died I dreamed about Gilia Saunders, which is abnormal for me because I never dream about people I know. Maybe it’s normal for others. Gilia stood next to an Appomattox Courthouse, barefoot, wearing an old-time Cattle Kate dress. Her hair was clean, her eyes bright. She chose a five iron from the leather bag in the cart. She approached the ball and pulled her dress sleeves up above her wrists.
Gilia swung and the ball soared into a faultless Wyoming sky. I kept the camera on her face a moment as she shaded her eyes with one hand, then I swung around to follow the ball. An osprey suddenly swooped down and snatched the ball in mid-flight. The osprey rose on an air current, flapped its wings three times, and, from a great altitude, dropped the golf ball on Gilia’s head. Gilia pitched forward onto the ladies’ tee and died.
I awoke with an erection.
In the morning, Chet, Maurey, and I went to Mountain Mortuary to make what are called the final arrangements: Chet, as partner; Maurey, as next of kin; me, as the one paying the bill. Mountain Mortuary is a ranch-style log cabin with heavy double doors and abandoned swallow nests in the eaves. Abandoned for the winter, anyway, they hang like lairs of mutant wasps. Inside, the floor is oak, a right-hand door leads into the chapel and a left-hand door into an office, where a young man about Gilia’s age in a blue sweater, slacks, and sandals stood looking out the window with his hands clasped behind his back.
At the sound of me setting the suitcase full of Pete’s clothes on the floor, the young man turned to face us and shake hands.
“Ron Mildren,” he said. “You must be the family and friends of Pete Pierce.”
Maurey and I nodded.
“Have a seat. You’ll find us more informal and personal than your city funeral homes. Can I bring anyone coffee?”
Maurey said “No,” I said “Yes,” and Chet didn’t say anything. While Ron went for coffee, Maurey and I flipped through a three-spiral binder marked Cremation Options. It was divided into “Showing and Service,” “Service Only,” and “No Showing, No Service,” with two more chapters at the back filled with photographs of special-order caskets and urns.
The urns were mostly either boxes or vases, but they had a few ceramic statues—leaping dolphins and a Greek woman without arms. One was five books that looked real but were hollow, so you could hide your loved one on a shelf. I studied an urn shaped like Cowboy Joe, the squatty University of Wyoming mascot I always thought was ripped off from Yosemite Sam.
Ron put my coffee on a coaster. “Did Peter go to UW?” he asked.
I said, “No.”
Maurey said, “Pete. Not Peter.”
“Sorry.” He handed her a clipboard with a questionnaire on birthdate, parents’ names, length of time in the armed forces, that sort of thing. As Ron outlined our options, his hands touched his earlobes and hair, nervously, and his left dimple twitched. We told him no showing, services at the Episcopal Church in Jackson, and Chet was to receive the ashes.
Maurey looked up from the form. “Why does it want to know if Pete had a pacemaker?”
A cloud crossed Ron’s face. “They run on a nuclear battery. You cremate a pacemaker and blooey”—his hands flew—“you can level a city block.” He nodded quickly. “It happened in St. Augustine, Florida.”
Chet spoke for the first time. “Is it just me, or does this strike anyone else as bizarre?”
Ron cracked. He’d held it together while everyone played their parts, but as soon as Chet vocalized the ironic weirdness of death, Ron’s face collapsed and his shoulders dropped as if he’d taken a blow in the back from a baseball bat.
His voice shook. “My wife was raised in the funeral business. She loves it, but I married in.”
Maurey glanced at me. I shrugged.
“It’s not the cadavers,” Ron went on. “I don’t want you thinking I’m squeamish over dead bodies.” His eyes begged us to believe him.
“I don’t think you’re squeamish,” I said.
“It’s dealing with the bereaved. I can’t help feeling what they feel.”
“You’re in the wrong job,” Maurey said.
“People come to me at the saddest moment of their lives and, instead of offering comfort, I’m expected to make retail sales. ‘That’ll be ten thousand dollars, ma’am. I know you’re penniless and your husband left you all alone, but we do take Visa and MasterCard.’” Tears dribbled down his cheeks. He made no move to stop the flow.
“We’re not penniless,” I said.
“And I’m not really alone,” Chet said. “I have friends.”
Ron sniffed. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
Maurey stood and went to a Kleenex box on the desk. She handed him a tissue and said, “Buck up. You don’t want your wife to see you like this.”
He stared at her. “How did you know?”
We met Gloria Mildren herself downstairs in the showroom. Urns filled a shelf on the left with caskets in the middle of the room and on the right. Each casket had a card giving the price and number of years on the warranty. Naturally, I drifted right over to the children’s casket. They only had one on hand, sized for about a six-year-old. It sold for eighteen hundred dollars and had a twelve-year warranty. I was afraid to ask what the warranty covered. I immediately imagined the child in the box, her little arms crossed over her chest, her hair brushed till it glowed. I could see the expression on her mother’s face. I knew her father’s helplessness. Sometimes being a novelist is a curse.
Chet and Maurey chose a bois d’arc box with ivory inlay for the ashes and a simple pine cremation casket. Cremation caskets are much like the burial kind, only they don’t have handles.
A woman’s voice came from a back hallway. “Orifices plugged up tight.” She walked into the showroom wearing a yoked shirt and 701 jeans, drying her hands on a Motel 6 towel. On seeing us, she had a moment’s embarrassment, but she recovered nicely. “Gloria Mildren,” she said, shaking hands all around. “My prayers are with you.”
We pretty much looked at the floor on that one.
Gloria’s eyes traveled the circle from us to her husband’s face. “Has Ronny been crying in front of the mourners again?”
I said, “No.”
“He cried in front of some folks from Pennsylvania last week. Their son skied into a tree and, if that wasn’t enough, when they came to view the body their funeral director bawled like a baby.” She turned to me. “How would you like it if that happened to you?”
“Ron was totally professional with us.” I looked to Chet and Maurey for confirmation.
Maurey nodded and said, “Totally,” but I don’t think Chet heard.
The woman put her hands on her hips. She had the classic Western body of a barrel racer—wide shoulders, small breasts, tiny waist, strong thighs. “Do you want to see him?”
I said, “Pete didn’t want a showing.”
She seemed disappointed. “Are you the lover?”
“What?”
“We heard he had a male lover.”
“I’m…that’s me,” Chet said.
“Oh.” She studied him a moment. “Anything we can do to make your time of grief easier, let us know. I lost a lover once. I know how rough it can be.”
“Thank you,” Chet said.
“You two weren’t married? I suppose not.”
“No.”
“Being married makes it more bearable. Everyone admits you’re worthy of sympathy. My lover’s wife got the condolences, the money, and the name, and I had to keep up the act.”
“I’m sorry,” Chet said.
“I know what you’re going through. Believe me.”
“I do.”
Maurey blew across the surface of her coffee. “There’s nothing worse than a shallow person trying to be thoughtful,” she said.
“Pete and I are used to it.” Chet inhaled on his cigarette. “She meant well.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Artificially deep people are worse when they mean well than when they don’t.”
We were sitting in a window booth at Dot’s Dine Out and I was nervous because when we walked in Hank waved at us from the far booth by the jukebox, where he sat facing Lydia. All I could see was the back of her head, but that was enough to pull my trigger.
Maurey continued. “Take ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.’ Whoever wrote that was actually trying to be profound.”
“‘Listen to the Warm,’” Chet said.
“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.”
I figured it was my turn. “Never take a rattlesnake by its tail or a woman by her word.”
Maurey poured creamer and stirred. “Doesn’t count. The author knew he was being cynical. We’re talking about sincere froth.”
“How about ‘Have a nice day’?”
Maurey smiled. “I can just hear Gloria Mildren chirping that as the hearse pulls away.”
Chet stared out the window. “Jesus loves me, this I know.”
Maurey and I glanced at each other, then down at our cups. I wondered if Lydia could hear us. I couldn’t hear her, but that didn’t mean anything.
Dot’s Dine Out may be the closest I have to a place that feels like home. It had a different name back then, but throughout junior high and high school I spent at least part of each day swilling coffee and trying to flirt with Dot Pollard, who was considerably more a mom than Lydia. Whenever the defeats and heartaches of puberty got me down, Dot was the woman I ran to, and I’d probably have starved to death if I had to depend on my own mother to feed me. That’s why when the owner, Max, died of hardened arteries, I loaned Dot the money to buy the cafe.
“Isn’t that your former husband?” Chet nodded toward Dothan Talbot coming from his real estate office across the street. “Pete pointed him out to me once.”
“I wish Pete wouldn’t go around exposing my shameful past,” Maurey said.
Dothan wore a camouflage jacket and light blue cowboy boots. He got into a new Ford pickup truck that sported an NRA decal and a bumper sticker reading
I didn’t get it.
“What’s the bumper sticker mean?” I asked.
“Filth,” Maurey said.
“Perhaps you should sue him,” Chet said.
“Oh, it’s okay. There’s been two ex-wives since me. Besides, it’s not considered cowboy to sue people in Wyoming. If he offends me bad enough, I’ll shoot his gas tank.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said.
Dot approached, carrying my chicken strip platter and Maurey’s chocolate malt. Chet was sticking to coffee. As far as I knew, he’d had nothing but coffee for two days, and it was starting to show on his face. Yesterday’s shock was being overwhelmed by today’s grief.
Dot watched with us as the truck pulled out of a handicapped parking space. She laughed and said, “Dothan tried to sell me a time share the other day. Took a lot of nerve, considering the grapevine says he’s bringing in a Roy Rogers roast beef franchise.” Except for adding twenty pounds, Dot hasn’t changed in two decades. She’s the only consistently cheerful person in my life.
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Where I hear ever’thing. Right here.”
“GroVont doesn’t need another restaurant. We’ve already got too many,” Maurey said. Dot’s Dine Out—under various names and disguises—and the Dairy Queen next to the Forest Service headquarters had been the only eating establishments in GroVont since the Second World War, until last summer, when a couple from Santa Barbara opened The Whole Grain out on the Jackson Highway. The Whole Grain specialized in hummus paninis and vinaigrettes.
“Hear from Jacob lately?” I asked. Dot’s son, Jacob, tends to go off on tangents, so it’s always risky to ask about him. You never know what you’re going to get. But if you haven’t seen Dot in a while, not asking about him is a pointed comment in itself.
Dot slid into the booth beside me and stole a French fry. “Jacob wrote a letter, said I was pedestrian and ruled by temporal lust and he’s chosen a new mother. Says she nurtures his inner spirit.”
Maurey stared me down. “Don’t you hate kids who turn on their mother?”
Dot dipped my fry in ketchup and went on, unaware of the arrow I’d just taken in the chest. “Ft. Worth Jones saw him in the Salt Lake Airport last month. Jacob was wearing a sheet and passing out free flowers. His head is shaved.”
If anyone deserves to be treated right by their son, it’s Dot. Had she been my mother, I’d buy her chocolates every day and a condo when she retires.
“Maybe we ought to drive down there and drag his cosmic butt home,” I said.
Dot laughed like I was kidding. “Lydia says it’s nothing but a phase they all go through and he’ll outgrow it.”
“I never went through an airport beggar phase.”
Dot popped the fry into her mouth. “Speaking of Lydia.”
“We weren’t,” I said.
“She’s sitting over there at Hank’s table. Maybe you should go visit with her.”
“Not likely.”
Maurey pointed her straw at my face. “When a loved one dies, all grudges are called off, Sam. That’s the rules.”
“Lydia doesn’t play by the rules.”
“If I can forgive her for mailing poison to Ronald Reagan’s dog, you can forgive her for faking rape.”
“The two sins aren’t equal.”
“How would you feel if Shannon refused to speak to you? Lord knows you’ve pulled stunts not everybody’s child would forgive.”
I considered this carefully. “At least if I ruin my daughter’s life, I won’t do it on purpose.”
“Nobody’s ruined your life on purpose.”
I stared down at my plate on the table. “Could of fooled me.”
At the top of my line of vision, Maurey’s hands doubled into fists. “You got a lot of nerve sitting in the same room with me and Chet and saying your life is ruined.”
“You guys are capable of a loving partnership. I’m not.”
Everybody ate or looked out the window in silence. I felt bad about saying my life was more ruined than Chet’s. It obviously wasn’t. He’d lost someone close and I hadn’t because I didn’t seem capable of having someone close. Up until Halloween, my purpose had been to give pleasure to women, and I’d been fairly good at it, but while I was busy giving women pleasure, I’d been unable to fall in love with one. I could love women I wasn’t romantically linked with—Shannon, Gus, Maurey as an adult—but the moment I found a clitoris I forgot the person it went with.
Dot unscrewed the salt shaker lid and began poking a toothpick through it from the underside. She said, “Oly’s licking salt shakers again. He drools all over the top and spit gets in the little holes.”
“I wish you’d told me that before I salted my French fries,” I said.
Dot polished the lid with her apron. “He must have a salt deficiency. Why else would anyone go around licking salt shakers?”
I snuck a look at Maurey to see if she was still angry, and she was. A dime-size red circle burned under each cheekbone. Her eyes had drifted far away. I said, “I could have sworn Oly Pedersen was the oldest man in the valley when we moved here twenty years ago.”
“He turned ninety last summer,” Dot said. “He’s holding out for a hundred so Paul Harvey will say his name on the radio. I don’t think he’ll make it with a salt deficiency.”
“Oly’s going to outlive us all,” Maurey said with some bitterness.
“I guess I don’t mind so much.” Dot screwed the more or less clean top back on the salt. “This way I don’t have to fill the shakers half as often as I used to.”
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” Chet said. I noticed he was falling into the habit of dry irony. That’s not a habit you want to fall into permanently.
Dot went on. “Lydia says he’s doing a public service. The collective blood pressure of the county is going down from lack of salt.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about Lydia,” I said.
“Why aren’t we talking about Lydia?” Lydia hovered, the other side of Dot. I kept my head down. No one answered her question, so she went right on.
“Sam. Son of mine. The county plowed in my car last week and now it’s almost buried. I’d like you to come by and shovel my car out. Are you willing to cooperate?”
The secret was to study details. Count my remaining fries. Quantify the slaw. The white gravy next to my last chicken strip had congealed. The surface shone like a bald head.
“I’ll do it,” Chet said.
Lydia made a click sound in her throat. “Thank you, no. Shoveling out a car is a son’s duty.”
I compared the ketchup glint to the gravy glisten. The ketchup shone brighter. By moving my spoon an inch, I could reflect the fluorescent ceiling tube into the ketchup gleam.
Lydia said, “Hey, big shot, I’m talking to you.”
I said, “I am not prepared to deal with you at this time.”
She used her ugly voice. “I am not prepared to deal with you at this time.”
I risked a glance at Maurey and Chet. They’d opted for false deafness. “Lydia,” I said. “I will never be able to compete with you at sarcastic banter. I doubt if anyone can be as verbally cruel as you, so I choose to shut up.”
She slammed her fists on the table. Both Dot and my plate jumped an inch. “I’ll show you verbal cruelty, you little in-grate. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
I slowly turned my head. She wore tight jeans and a blouse that had been popular back in the fifties. She carried a leather purse shaped like a Western saddle. Because of my low angle and her eye makeup, she came off as fierce and forthright—the proud holder of righteous indignation.
I said, “I destroyed three families and a boy tried to kill himself.”
“And that’s my fault?” The vein in her forehead bulged out, pulsating in an almost sexual manner.
“Yes.”
“Sam, you’re thirty-three years old. You haven’t lived at home since you were eighteen.”
“Seventeen.”
“It’s time to stop blaming me every time you wet the bed.”
“What?”
“My not breast-feeding you had nothing to do with that boy resorting to suicide.”
Breast-feeding? The woman’s self-delusions floored me. “You said my fathers raped you when it was you who paid them two dollars each.”
“So I forgot some details.”
I studied Lydia’s face. As she’d aged, her neck got stringier, and a network of lines came off her mouth, but the eyes were the same. Did she not know what that lie had done to me? Did she honestly feel no remorse? “Mom, those details affect the way I see men. Women. Myself. Because of the rape story, I don’t think I’m capable of love. And I’m afraid it’s too late to change.”
She stared at me for a two-count, then she snapped open her purse and pulled out a Kleenex. “Here. Cry on something that cares.”
By early afternoon the bunkhouse twenty-gallon water heater had recovered from the morning rush and it was my turn to shower. I like showers. Generally, they make me feel renewed, as if a clean body equals a clean slate, but TM Ranch bunkhouse showers leave a lot to be desired. That’s because the stall has rusted seams that turn the water brown as it passes over your feet, and after you dry off you have to go back outside and circle around to your room. Nobody much minds in summer when all it takes is flip-flops and boxer shorts, but winter means completely redressing, boots included.
During the rinse cycle I went into a daydream where Shannon wins the first Nobel Prize in Anthropology. The Swedish government flies both of us to Stockholm and puts us up in the finest hotel in Europe, one of those places where the maid turns down your bed at night so you don’t have to fluff your own pillow. At the ceremony, Shannon, vibrant and beautiful as she is, stands before the hall of intellectuals and gives me all the credit.
“I never would have discovered the lost civilization of Borneo if not for the continued love and support of my dad,” Shannon says, “and I am here to announce that I have named the era that these people flourished as the Samcallahantic Period.”
Then Shannon kisses me on both cheeks and my stomach goes soppy nauseous. The nausea-from-love stomach part actually happened in the shower. Just thinking about my daughter could do that to me.
When I turned off the water the pipes made a painful shuddering sound. I stepped from the stall to find Hank standing between me and my towel, holding a chain saw.
He said, “The boys and I are going after a Christmas tree.”
I don’t do well when I’m naked and other people aren’t. “Won’t a Christmas tree be kind of maudlin, what with Pete dying and all?”
“Maurey decided Auburn and Roger deserve a Christmas. There hasn’t been much cheer the last few months. She gave orders no one is to be depressed from after the funeral through New Year’s.”
I shifted to slide past him to my towel on the nail on the wall, but Hank didn’t take the hint. Instead, he averted his eyes the way Blackfeet are supposed to when they have something serious to say.
“Your mother cried this morning,” he said.
“Lydia hasn’t cried since the day she was born, and that was only a rumor.”
He nodded. “After the two of you shouted at one another in Dot’s, I drove her home and she cried in the truck.”
I considered what this might mean. “Regret or manipulation?”
“It appeared as regret.”
“How would you know with Lydia?”
“She feels badly about what she did.”
“Then why doesn’t she say so?”
The outside door opened and Chet entered. He said, “It’s getting cold out there.”
Hank said, “Should be zero tonight.”
Great. Now I’m naked in front of a Blackfoot with a chain saw and a known homosexual. Chet sat on the changing bench and lit a cigarette, cool and calm as if he were waiting for a bus. I have this recurring dream where I’m in a crowd of well-dressed people and I’m nude but no one seems to notice. Must be a primal fear thing because the dream shrivels my penis.
“How’s Pete’s eulogy coming along?” Chet asked.
“What?”
“We truly appreciate you taking care of it. I know you and Pete didn’t always see eye to eye, but he respected your creative drive. Even though he never read one, I heard him say more than once that your novels are an achievement.”
I tried holding my hands, casually, so they covered me without it appearing that I was covering myself on purpose.
Chet lifted his face to look straight into my eyes. “I know you’ll do Pete right by your eulogy.”
Behind my back, the toilet flushed. The commode stall door opened and closed and Toinette said, “Can I tag along when you go to cut the Christmas tree?”
My manhood disappeared in a black forest of pubic hair.
“Looking at a woman as an object you can give pleasure to is just as bogus as looking at a woman as an object that can give pleasure to you. It’s still looking at the woman as an object.” Maurey downshifted on a grade, then hit the flats and punched the gears back into fourth. The woman was fearless in four-wheel drive. Ice meant nothing.
“But it makes me feel worthwhile when I save a woman.”
She rammed back into third for a corner. “You can’t save a woman by giving her an orgasm.”
Words to live by. “Even if she isn’t getting them in her normal life?”
“Right. Have you slept with this Gilia girl?”
“Of course not.”
“What ‘of course not’? You’ve slept with half the heifers in the Confederacy. It shouldn’t be unreasonable to ask if you’ve slept with someone you actually like.”
“Gilia’s a friend.”
“Since when are friends off limits?”
I looked out at the red willow wands sprouting from the snow crust and tried to come up with an explanation. “Friendship love is real; romantic love is conditional—don’t sleep with anyone else, don’t be a constant drunk, get a job, don’t commit social blunders in front of my parents, love me back—and romantic lovers are based on chemical attraction; to me that isn’t very important compared to real love.”
Maurey ripped back into fourth and shot around a snow plow. She said, “I can see now why your wife left you.”
“Me too.”
Far to the south, the sun was setting with all the power of a weak flashlight beam. The dash clock said 4:30 and I remembered from some book that this was the shortest day of the year. Across the valley, green lights flickered on as an outline for the runway. I said a small prayer to Whomever to bring my daughter safely out of the sky.
“Do you think it’s possible for people to change?” I asked.
Maurey glanced at me, then back at the road. In the soft pink light of the alpenglow her face was the same as I pictured it from twenty years past, when we were lovers.
“I did,” she said.
“But you had alcohol you could quit. People with concrete problems like alcoholism or obesity or an abusive husband can solve the problem and, ultimately, change themselves. What about us poor stooges who are vaguely miserable, but don’t have any real monsters to battle against?”
Maurey downshifted and hit the blinker behind a line of cars turning into the airport. “Everybody’s vaguely miserable sometimes,” she said, “and most people are vaguely miserable most of the time. The trick is to scrap your way from the most-of-the-time to the some-of-the-time category.”
“How?”
She ticked off on her fingers. “True love, kids, mountains, exercise, and work you think matters. If none of that does it, I’d consider antidepressants.”
Maurey flashed on her brights and pulled to within a car’s length of a new Ford pickup, seemingly intent on blinding its driver. She said, “Speaking of vaguely miserable, that’s Dothan ahead of us.”
I peered at the spotlessly clean truck with the bumper sticker I still didn’t get. “You think Dothan’s miserable?”
“Deep down inside, Dothan can’t stand himself.”
“He hides it well.”
“None of the valley women will touch him with a stick. Dot says he’s flying in some bimbo from Denver whose husband is in chemotherapy. Even you never sank that low.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
Dothan Talbot beat me up in the seventh grade. He rubbed my face in the snow and twisted my arm around my back, then he became Maurey’s boyfriend after I had already impregnated her. He knew I had impregnated her and I knew he was touching her with his grubby fingers, so it was only natural for us to evolve into lifelong enemies. Plus, Dothan was, and still is, a Class A jerk. He’d have been in the Mafia if he had come from a town of over five hundred people. As it is, he sells real estate.
I ran into him in the airport bathroom. Shannon’s plane was late, like they all are in winter here, and I was nervous about seeing her. Up until then, I’d been fairly numb over what a mess I’d made of life, but now with Shannon’s arrival I was going to have to start feeling again, and I wasn’t sure I was ready.
When I’m nervous I need to pee every five minutes, so I left Maurey in the terminal and went to the bathroom, where I found Dothan standing in front of a mirror, combing Brylcreem into his hair. He’s worn his hair the same way for as long as I’ve known him, which means he must have greased out ten thousand pillows since junior high.
He glanced at me in the mirror and grinned the way people will when they hate your guts. “Hello, Callahan.”
“Yeah, right.” I needed to go pretty bad but I wasn’t about to pull out my pecker in front of Dothan. Standing in the middle of the room doing nothing felt stupid. The only alternative was washing my hands at the sink next to him.
“Still Maurey’s puppy, I see,” Dothan said.
It was one of those water-saving sinks where you push a button to get water but the moment you let go of the button a spring or something pops it back up and the water flow stops. This works fine if only one hand is dirty.
“You know the whole town laughs at you behind your back,” Dothan said.
I pushed the button with my right hand and squeezed soap from the dispenser with my left. Dothan’s primping style also took two hands—one for combing and one for patting grease.
He said, “I’m telling you as a favor. No one else in the valley will tell you the truth but I can give it to you straight. They all know you slipped the meat to Maurey once twenty years ago and you’ve been following her around sniffing her panties and being pitiful ever since.”
I lathered my hands.
Dothan stared at me in the mirror. “Maurey’ll never let you have sloppy seconds. Everyone knows she takes your money and doesn’t give shit back.”
I held the button with my left hand and rinsed the right, then switched off the other way.
“If I paid for her queer brother’s funeral, I’d at least get a blow job,” Dothan said.
Holding my hands up, I walked to the hot-air dryer and punched it on with my elbow. Over the whir of blowing air, I said, “Dothan, you’re never going to have a friend in your whole life.”
Dothan laughed heartily as he headed for the door. Halfway through, he turned back and said, “Maurey’s laughing at you, son. Just like me and everybody else.”
Dothan’s bimbo was first off the plane and across the runway. She had zit-red hair with black roots and wore a yellow halter thing and tight pants that were totally inappropriate for winter. The two of them kissed and rubbed against each other in a disgusting public display of affection made all the more poignant by the fact her husband was off in a hospital somewhere with cancer.
“Are we friends?” I asked Maurey.
She was watching Dothan and the tramp. “Of course we’re friends.”
“You aren’t laughing at me behind my back?”
Maurey touched my arm. “You’ve been listening to Dothan again. When are you going to learn he’s nothing but a dildo with ears.”
“You’re right.”
“There she is.”
Shannon came off the plane, wearing a yoked down jacket and some kind of jeans that weren’t Levi’s or Wranglers. As she made her way down the steps, she was talking to an older, gentlemanly type with a mustache and a cane. Shannon looked confident and composed, at home in her element. Nineteen-year-old women weren’t composed when I was nineteen.
Maurey said, “Airport scenes are so much nicer when the passengers walk down the steps and across the runway. Those tunnels took the romance out of flight.”
Shannon said good-bye to the old man and came bouncing across the runway and I had that Jesus, shit, I created this feeling I always get when I see her for the first time after a separation. Shannon didn’t seem any less a miracle now than the day she was born.
Then she burst through the double doors, all smiles and laughs. I think for a moment she forgot she was here for a funeral. She gave me a two-handed hug and a kiss on the cheek, then she moved on to Maurey. They hadn’t seen each other since summer, and Shannon finally remembered Pete and the purpose of the trip, so the hugs were spirited and meaningful.
“I appreciate you coming,” Maurey said.
Shannon’s brown eyes went smoky. “Uncle Pete was always nice to me. When I was little he used to send me flowers on Valentine’s.”
I didn’t remember that. It seemed like something I should remember.
Maurey said, “More than once Pete told me you were the only thing I ever got right,” and they hugged again.
Shannon had brought two suitcases plus her carry-on, so we had to wait at the conveyor belt surrounded by skiers in off-colored clothes. They talked loudly about inches and runs. I glared at boys who were checking out my daughter. Maurey got as many looks as Shannon, but I figured I had no right to glare at Maurey’s bunch. She was old enough to handle oglers without my help.
As often as they talked on the telephone, you’d think Shannon and Maurey wouldn’t have that much left to catch up on, but the moment I finished the how-was-your-flight formalities they launched into mother-daughter gossip. Shannon gave a detailed description of a pair of boots she almost bought for the trip, Maurey talked about horses and how successful Pud was in the satellite dish repair business. Shannon gave a Eugene report.
“He wants us to date each other and other people at the same time. Says it would be values affirming. I said, ‘Fat chance.’”
“You can’t date a guy after you’ve lived with him,” Maurey said.
“At your age I think you should still be playing the field,” I said.
They both stared at me until I volunteered to go pluck her suitcases off the conveyor carrel. As I made my way through the skier jam, I heard Shannon say, “Play the field?”
Maurey said, “You’ll have to excuse your father. He learned his parenting skills from Leave It to Beaver.”
At the ranch, we found a Douglas fir lying on its side in the living room. Pud and Hank were crouched on the floor with a measuring tape. Toinette, Auburn, and Roger sat at a card table, stringing popcorn and chokecherries while Chet was off in Pete’s room, talking to New Yorkers on the telephone.
“Our tree’s too big!” Auburn shouted.
Hank and Pud studied the situation.
“We could cut a hole in the ceiling,” Hank said.
“Or the floor,” Pud said.
“Or take thirty inches off the middle and splice the tree together,” Hank added.
This is your typical example of Native American humor. As a kid, it drove me crazy, but now it was Auburn’s turn.
He crowed. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
Hank’s face was dead serious. “You got a better idea?”
Maurey introduced Shannon to Toinette and Roger. Toinette offered her supper, but Shannon said she had eaten on the plane. Shannon complimented Roger on his chokecherry necklace and asked him to show her how it was done.
“What’s Gus up to?” I asked.
“Gus is on a cleaning binge. She’s throwing out everything she doesn’t consider vital to survival.”
“My baseball cards?”
“They went the first day.”
Chet came from Pete’s room. “Our friends are coming in tomorrow.”
“Do they need a place to stay?” Maurey asked.
“I made reservations at Snow King Inn.”
Shannon and Chet shook hands and Shannon said she was sorry about Pete. Chet said Pete spoke of her often; Maurey went to the kitchen and brought back lemonade and these little crackers shaped like fish. Everything was going fine—I’d just taken my place at the popcorn-stringing station—when Shannon said, “I expected Grandma Lydia to be here.”
I stuck a needle through a popped kernel and the kernel broke in half, leaving me with nothing on my needle.
“Your father and grandmother aren’t speaking,” Maurey said.
Shannon looked at me. “Why not?”
Maurey answered. “He says she ruined his life.”
I set the needle next to my lemonade and gave up on Christmas decorating. There’s no use trying to be constructive when you’re ganged up on by women.
“That was weeks ago,” Shannon said. “You be nice to your mother.”
“She’s not nice to me.”
“Jeeze, Louise, who’s the grown-up around here? Dad, I want you to march down to her house and make up. Right now.”
“No.”
Maurey said, “Forgive your mother, Sam.”
Hank said, “You have the power to make her Christmas bright.”
“I won’t do it.”
No one would look at me, except Roger who had an expression on his face like I’d stolen his teddy bear.
The silence didn’t last long. Shannon laid down an ultimatum. “Forgive Lydia or I won’t forgive you.”
I hate ultimatums. “For what?”
“For hurting my friend Gilia. For messing up Halloween by making that boy try to kill himself on our front porch.”
“Don’t forget he was creepy to your boyfriend,” Maurey said.
“That too.”
I stood up. All day I’d been looking forward to my daughter’s arrival, and now this.
“I’m being persecuted,” I said.
Chet’s face was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. He said, “People you love die. Don’t waste precious time holding grudges.”
I searched the room for an ally—Chet to Roger to Auburn to Hank to Shannon to Maurey. They were all accusing me and they were all wrong.
I said, “I’m going to bed.”
She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself to him.
Ah, Madame Bovary. If only someone would throw back her white neck for me. Emma was so happy there for a moment, not knowing that she, like Anna Karenina and Oedipus’s mother and so many other lovely yet loose women created by male novelists, would soon die a cruel death at her own hand.
On Lydia’s fortieth birthday, Shannon and I flew up from North Carolina to surprise her. Hank arranged for us and practically everyone else who knew Lydia to meet at this hoity-toity restaurant in Teton Village. Surprise birthday parties carry a high risk. Take Katrina’s as an example. Anyway, Hank told Lydia the two of them were going out to eat, and when she walked into the dining room we all yelled “Surprise!” and broke into that awful song. Lydia’s face turned to wax, she looked at the massive cake Dot had baked, and she looked at me; then, calmly, she left. I didn’t see her again for two years.
They—my family and friends—were probably right about Lydia. I’ve found there are few instances where I’m right and everybody else is wrong. In the morning I would drive into GroVont and do whatever it took to reestablish a relationship with my mother.
A knock came at the door, which is always interesting in the middle of the night. I welcome late night knocks. I marked my place in Madame Bovary with a Kleenex strip as Shannon walked through the door wearing her pac boots without socks and her cold weather flannel nightgown.
She held out two wrapped Fudgsicles. “You hungry?”
I nodded even though I wasn’t, particularly.
She gave me a Fudgsicle, then pushed my feet over under the blanket, clearing a spot so she could sit on the end of the bed. I could see her looking around at my living situation, critically. Even though the room had been home for over six weeks, it wasn’t much more personal than a monk’s cell. I had a bedside stump for my Kleenex box and Madame Bovary and a length of clothesline between two nails for a closet. Five or six dirty coffee cups sat mired in dust bunnies under the bed.
“I’m planning to fix the place up after Christmas,” I said.
Shannon said, “Don’t go out of your way on my account.” From somewhere in the flannel nightgown she produced a baby blue envelope. “Gilia sent you a letter.”
She must have originally planned to mail it because the letter had been addressed and stamped. It was one of those personalized stationery envelopes women give each other as gifts, the kind with the return address embossed in white. The uncanceled stamp was a painting of a Baltimore oriole—it said so under the picture—but best of all the envelope smelled ever so lightly of Gilia.
“What did you do to her?” Shannon asked.
“How do you mean that?”
Shannon tore the top off her Fudgsicle wrapper and pulled the paper down over the stick. I don’t do it that way. I pull the wrap up over the top, like a sweater.
“Gilia’s been moping around ever since you dumped on her. I asked what was the matter and she said you two connected intellectually and emotionally.” Shannon did this arch thing with her right eyebrow. “You didn’t screw her, did you?”
“Of course not.”
I turned the letter over and looked at the back. It didn’t have any of those Xs and Os most women put on letters.
“She’d be nuts to give you another chance.” Shannon sucked the curved tip of her Fudgsicle. “But if she does, you better not blow it again, Daddy.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want a parade of Wandas in and out of my life.”
“Me either.”
We each slurped our ice cream bars in silence for a while. I poked my fingertips with the sharp corners of the envelope and hefted it for weight—didn’t feel like more than one page. I wondered if it would be rude to read it in front of Shannon. She seemed lost in thought. She was staring at her Fudgsicle the way I stare into coffee when I’ve got something intense on my mind.
Suddenly, with no warning, Shannon raised her head and hit me with the full force of her brown eyes. “Dad, we need to talk.”
I bit off a chunk of chocolate ice and waited, in no hurry. Whenever a woman says “We need to talk,” it means she’s reached a decision and it’s already too late for you to talk back.
She said, “A couple of girls from UNC-G have an apartment on Carr Street, there across from the school. They needed a roommate and I applied and they took me.”
I didn’t understand at first. “But that would mean moving out of the Manor House.”
“Yes, moving in with them means moving out on you.”
“All your stuff is at home.”
She reached over and patted my shin under the blanket. “I’m getting a new home.”
Pretend your sacred daughter sticks a knife between your ribs into your heart and twists it and you’ll get an inkling of how I felt. “Why would you want to leave our house? You need more space? I’ll give you more space.”
“I’m nineteen, Daddy. I’ll be twenty next summer. It’s time I got out on my own.”
“You can be on your own at home. Ask the girls to move in with us. There’s plenty of room and they won’t even have to pay rent.”
“Living with girls isn’t the point. It’s a matter of independence. I’m leaving the nest and you have to let me.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
Melted chocolate ran down the stick onto my fingers. Shannon was staring at me hard, the way Gilia used to. It’s not fair women can do that and men can’t.
“Will you be living with Eugene?” I asked. “Is this an excuse for unbridled sex?”
When I said unbridled, Shannon smiled. She knew in my imagination I was picturing her as a debauched harlot. “I’m done with Eugene, and this doesn’t have anything to do with sex. It’s my freedom.”
She was too young to talk about freedom. Only yesterday, she’d held my hand when we crossed the street. She used to run all the way home from first grade because she missed me. Hell, I used to run all the way home from eighth grade because I missed her.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“We’ll see each other.” Shannon’s laugh was a clear bell. “I’m bound to be over with dirty laundry.”
Maurey was right: Life is the shits. “But all I’ve ever done is take care of you.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to do something else.” Shannon leaned forward to kiss my cheek and take the stick out of my hand. “See you in the morning,” she said. Then she was gone.
Dear Sam,
Shannon says you don’t conquer females the way my ex-husband did. She says you have an obsessive compulsion to save lost women, that you meet miserable women who need love which you translate as sex and you convince yourself their lives wouldn’t be miserable anymore if only you would do them the favor of sleeping with them.
According to your letter, you were planning to commit to me at some unnamed point in the future, but I don’t see how you can commit to anyone if you have an obsessive compulsion that forces you to sleep with sluts.
Atalanta Williams says you have never been loved by a good woman and if a good woman were to ever love you, you would straighten up.
My father says you are a truthless satyrmaniac and Skip Prescott says you’re a “pussy hound,” among other things.
I don’t know what I say. All I know is I miss our talks and you are a villain.
Sincerely,
Gilia
I dreamed I was trapped in an elevator with thirteen Greco-Roman wrestlers. Their nude bodies glistened in virgin olive oil. Testicles hung down like baseballs in the toes of full-figure panty hose. I was wearing a Victoria’s Secret crepe chemise with nothing on underneath. The wrestlers milled back and forth, moaning and jostling me with their shoulders, thighs, and slick buttocks. Suddenly, over by the elevator controls, an Indian pull-started a Poulan chain saw. Lydia shouted, “Castrate the homophobe!” and the wrestlers rushed to the opposite corner of the elevator, crushing me between layers of naked male flesh.
In the morning, I dropped Maurey and Shannon off in Jackson so they could Christmas shop for the boys. The plan was for me to drive back to GroVont, reconcile with my mother, then pick the women up around noon and go back to the ranch, where Maurey had a job lined up for me and Pud—something about elk in the hay.
The plan reminded me of when I used to write lists of what to do today:
Take a shower.
Buy socks.
Write great American novel.
Pick up film at Wal-Mart.
It’s like if you sneak the big chore in, maybe you’ll check it off without noticing, only this would be harder because I’d written novels before; I’d never reconciled with my mother.
“Go to her with your heart in your hand,” Maurey said. “Lydia can’t deal with open vulnerability.”
“Beg her forgiveness,” Shannon said.
“Beg her forgiveness for what? She’s the one who lied.”
Shannon patted me on the back of the head. “Jesus, Daddy, you’re so naive.”
The morning was beautiful—fresh snow on the Tetons, royal blue sky above, robin’s-egg blue sky on the horizon. Winter can be real nice from inside a warm Suburban with two wonderful women by your side.
When I stopped at the Jackson Town Square, Maurey said, “Don’t lose your temper. Remember, she’s the childish one, you’re the adult.”
“Yes.”
Shannon giggled. “I’m lots more mature than Daddy, who’s lots more mature than Grandma. Our family must run in reverse.”
“The Callahan clan does everything backward,” Maurey said, opening her door. “Let’s go to the bank first so I can get some money.”
“No need, I still have Dad’s credit card.”
Instead of driving away, I sat with both hands on the steering wheel watching Maurey and Shannon walk toward the nearest tourist trap. From the backside, they not only could have been sisters, they could have been twins. Same dark hair—Shannon’s short, Maurey’s long—same shoulders, as they walked their arms swung the same distance from their look-alike hips. Maurey said something and touched Shannon on the elbow, then Shannon looked back at me and burst into laughter.
I imagine Maurey had said words to the effect of “What do you bet he’s still sitting there, mooney-eyed with sentimentality.” Words to that effect anyway. Women love to think men are predictable; I try not to let them down.
As I made my way across the frozen valley back along the highway to GroVont, I rehearsed possibilities of the upcoming scene with Lydia. What was I supposed to say? You don’t erase twenty years of pain by quoting the back cover of a self-help book.
“Gee, Mom, it’s fine you raised me thinking I was a child of rape when I wasn’t. I can validate the empowerment that motivated your disinformation response.”
“Thank you, Son, I accept responsibility for my actions.”
Then we would cry cathartic tears and join arms around a campfire and sing “Kumbaya, My Lord” in perfect harmony.
Fat chance.
You could tell from several houses down the street that something had happened at Lydia’s. Hank’s truck was backed in the driveway and the tailgate was down. Possessions were piled around the sides—skis, snowshoes, Lydia’s swivel work chair. When I pulled up next to the truck, I saw it was partially loaded with book boxes, a stereo, a painting of Martha Washington burning a bra over the Delaware, and Lydia’s computer.
The cabin door opened and Hank came out, carrying two file boxes. I stood between the Suburban and his truck while he carefully stacked the boxes against the back of the cab.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Hank studied the label on the end of a box. “The Castration Solution.”
“Why is Lydia moving Oothoon?”
Hank turned to me and held his hands up, waist high, in a Blackfoot don’t-ask-me gesture. He said, “She’s joining the feminist underground.”
“Is it because of me?”
“A man from Federal Express telephoned. Said her lost overnight packet had been found under the short leg of a dispatcher’s desk in Hannibal, Missouri. Said the dispatcher is fired, Lydia’s money will be returned, and the packet will be delivered by ten A.M. today.”
“The poisoned chew toy.”
“We’ll hide out on the reservation until whatever happens blows over.”
“I don’t think assassination attempts on the President’s dog blow over.”
Hank shrugged. “Your mother always wanted to be an outlaw.”
“What about you?”
The door slammed and Lydia appeared with two pairs of boots and a lamp made from an elk horn and semi-translucent rawhide. One pair of boots was normal brown with dark stitching, but the other pair had been painted yellow. Lydia herself wore sneakers, jeans, and a Patagonia jacket.
She said, “I’m leaving the TV, the Atari, and my car. You better take good care of her—oil changes every spring and fall. You’ll need new tires if you plan on driving this winter.”
I looked at the lump of snow in the front yard that hid Lydia’s twelve-year-old BMW with something like 180,000 miles on the engine. The two cars she’d owned before this had also been over-the-hill BMWs. Don’t ask me why.
She talked as she transferred her load to Hank. “Periodically while we’re in Canada I shall be mailing manifestos for you to release to the media. Don’t let those twits at Newsweek edit my copy.”
“I thought you were disappearing on the reservation.”
Lydia glared at Hank, who hung his head, shy dog-style. “Somebody’s got a big mouth,” she said, which may be the least true statement anyone ever made about Hank Elkrunner. “Tell the Secret Service we’re in Mexico. Don’t mention Canada until they break out the persuasion devices.”
“Persuasion devices?”
Hank fit the lamp and boots into the back end like pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. He said, “I’ll walk to Zion’s Grocery and pick up some food for the road. You two can finish loading.”
A look of dismay flitted across Lydia’s narrow face. “You’re leaving me alone with him on purpose, aren’t you?” Hank gave his near smile.
Lydia said, “Rat.”
Hank walked up the street, toward what passed for downtown GroVont. Lydia and I stood next to the truck, watching Hank’s back as an alternative to looking at each other.
I said, “Don’t you think making Hank into a fugitive is a lot to ask?”
Lydia turned, her hands on her hips, thumbs forward, fingers back. “Hank believes in loyalty—unlike other members of my immediate family.”
“What’s the chances of us having this discussion without snide sarcasm?”
Her hands dropped to her sides, and for one fleeting moment, Lydia looked profoundly depressed. “Slim. Or none.”
Her first unguarded statement since I don’t remember when—I took it as a good sign.
She looked at the truck and sighed. “Men have forced women to fall back on whatever weapons they have, and I’m afraid I’m down to sarcasm. Come on in and warm up. You may as well be of some use while you’re here.”
Whenever the television screen shows long lines of refugees running from a natural or manmade disaster, it’s always interesting to see what possessions they deem important enough to flee with on short notice. Cooking utensils and bedding seem to head the list, followed by edible animals. Lydia hadn’t packed any of that stuff. Instead, she went into hiding with her Oothoon Press files, most of her Ann Coe art collection, and a suitcase full of Danskins. A pile of political books. An exercise trampoline.
While Lydia finished packing, I wandered the house, taking in cracks in the logs and stains in the kitchen sink. When you grow up in a house, each square foot of wall and floor carries a memory, or not so much a memory as the emotion of one. I couldn’t recall what event caused my strange stirrings at standing in my former closet, but I felt the strange stirrings just the same, as if the past had turned into its own shadow.
Lydia found me standing in the closet and told me to disconnect the VCR in her bedroom and take it to the truck, but to leave the TV. I guess wherever she and Hank planned to hide out already had a television.
As I walked down the hall with the VCR in my hands, I passed the open bathroom door and looked in to see Lydia staring at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Maybe it was a dimple in the mirror, or maybe leaving home after twenty years got to her, but I thought I saw a tear hanging off her lower eyelid. I thought her lip trembled. When she saw me in the doorway behind her, she focused her eyes on mine. Finally we were eye to eye, even if her back was to me.
“Remember when we moved in here?” she said. “That doctor Caspar rented from had dead animals on every wall.”
“You slept on the couch for three months.”
“Until Hank got me into bed.”
“Why the lie, Lydia?”
She blinked once and whipped open the medicine cabinet. One hand held a paper bag while the other hand scooped in pill bottles, aspirin tins, and boxes of Q-Tips. “You’re not going to let it drop, are you?”
“I can’t.”
A plastic jar of Mary Kay night cream missed the bag and hit the floor, where it rolled under the club-footed bathtub. Lydia’s back rose and fell, then she turned to face me.
“Okay, shoot. Accuse me of child abuse.”
I sat on the side of the tub with the VCR in my lap. Lydia closed the toilet lid and sat on it. The déjà vu element was amazing. We could have been mother and son in 1965, settling in for one of our sink-side bull sessions.
I repeated, “Why the lie?”
She blinked twice more. “I couldn’t very well tell the truth.”
“You didn’t have to tell me anything.”
She did the maneuver where she blew air straight up, lifting her bangs off her forehead. It translated as Give me a break.
“You kept hounding me for information, and then you found those pictures in my panty box. What were you doing in my panty box in the first place?”
Typical ploy—shift the defensiveness to me. “Don’t change the subject.”
“Times like this I would give anything to still smoke.”
The stall technique. I said, “Lydia.”
She crossed the right ankle over her left shin. “Sooner or later I had to come up with a story.”
“But gang rape?”
She dropped her eyes to the floor. Her voice was small. “That’s the story I told myself. After you tell yourself something a thousand times, you forget it’s not true.” She seemed to be drifting back in time, growing younger as I watched. “When you called to ask if their names matched Shannon’s list, I didn’t remember at first what really happened.” She looked up, willing me to believe her. “I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do.”
“The truth might have worked.”
She uncrossed her legs. “I thought the truth would make you hate me. You may not believe it, but I don’t want you to hate me.”
I’d come prepared for anger and screams and gotten what I least expected—sincerity from my mother. Maybe. When you’ve grown up with the queen of manipulation, you learn to distrust anything that seems straightforward. My great fear was that someday Lydia would break down and speak the truth and I’d be too suspicious to listen.
She must have seen the doubt in my face. “What do you want from me, Sam?”
I stared at the VCR. “Remorse. Some indication that you’re sorry you screwed up my life.”
“One social blunder of mine did not screw up your life.”
“It’s not just the lie. You were never a mother. From the time we left your daddy’s house, I cooked all the meals, did the laundry, tucked you in at night.”
“You volunteered to cook and clean.”
“You never once told me to do my homework or pick up my socks. I was the only kid in seventh grade who could stay out all night without calling home.”
“Some boys would like that.”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
She snapped. “Okay. I’m sorry. Are you satisfied now?”
The vein in Lydia’s forehead beat a blue rhythm. She couldn’t help who she was. You can no more force your parents to change than you can teach a cat to stop killing songbirds.
I said, “There’s a big gap between apology and condescending glibness.”
Lydia almost fired off an angry retort, but something changed her mind, and she slipped back into sadness. She pouted. “I’m not the type for guilt.”
“I know.” My reflection in the VCR control panel was distorted by knobs and switches. If I moved my head a bit to the side, my nose looked like a pig’s snout. “I wonder why I’m nothing but a huge glob of guilt.”
“It must skip generations.”
What did that mean for Shannon? Lydia leaned forward on the toilet seat and laced her fingers into a web. She spoke to her palms. “I had you right after I turned fifteen, the poor little rich girl who’d never made a decision in her life. Pregnancy doesn’t give you instant maturity. It just makes you fat.”
She raised her hands to her face, thumbs on cheekbones, and looked at me through the web. “I’m sorry I did such a shitty job raising you.”
Maybe she meant it. Maybe not. I like to think she did. Either way, I’d gotten what I came for.
“I’m sorry I lied about the rape. I’m sorry I didn’t bake cookies and sing lullabies to you in your crib. I’m sorry you did the laundry. I’m sorry I let you stay out all night—what was the other thing?”
“Homework.”
“I’m sorry I never made you do homework.” She dropped her hands. “Anything else?”
“I guess not.”
“Can you get on with your life now?”
“Yes, I can get on with my life.”
“’Bout damn time.”
We celebrated with a conciliatory cup of coffee at the kitchen table. It’s a wonderful old table Lydia found at the estate sale of an old dude ranch where Owen Wister was supposed to have written The Virginian. I liked to imagine Owen writing, “When you call me that, smile!” then spilling his whiskey on this very wood. As soon as Lydia went underground and left me in charge of the house, I planned to steal the table and take it back to Carolina.
Lydia held the cup with both hands and blew steam from the surface. Ever since I can remember, Lydia’s held her coffee cup with both hands. She said, “Did you ever wonder what I did that pissed Caspar off so much he sent us west?”
“Only twice a day for twenty years.”
Lydia glanced at me, then back at her coffee. “Right after you turned twelve, I started seeing Skip.”
“Seeing?”
Her lips flattened in disgust at my stupid question. “Okay, fucking.”
Someday I meant to price lie detector tests. “Funny he didn’t mention it,” I said.
“Skip didn’t know who I was. We had to sneak around on account of his bitchy little wife and my father, so Skip never saw the house. He’d forgotten my name by then, if he ever knew it.”
Lydia with Skip and me with Skip’s wife made for a number of abstract equations.
“Whoever invented the term Southern peckerhead must have been thinking of Skip,” I said.
“Don’t I know it. I only saw him to upset Caspar.” Lydia smiled into her cup. “Upsetting Daddy was the prime directive of my childhood. I can’t tell you how many jerks I did nasty with trying to get his attention.”
“Caspar knew about my fathers?”
“I told him the rape story first, but he threatened to cane them in public, so I had to come clean.”
“You told your father the truth, but not me?”
“I already said that, Sam. Repeating it won’t change the facts.”
When I was young I had this strange feeling everyone around me knew something I didn’t know. Turns out I was right.
“So you screwed Skip, again, and Caspar found out—”
“Caspar always found out.”
“And he shipped us as far away as he could imagine.”
She nodded. “This house. Now that I’m leaving, I think I’ll miss it.”
“C’mon, Lydia. The bureaucrat in charge of dog gifts will open the FedEx packet, throw the toy in the trash, and that will be the end of it.”
Lydia looked dubious. Outside, a truck door slammed. Lydia clicked down her cup.
“Hank’s back,” she said. “Are we done with accusations and recriminations, because I have to hit the trail?”
“I guess so. Shouldn’t we break some glass or scream at each other first? That’s how I was brought up.”
Lydia carried her coffee dregs to the sink. “I’m tired of breaking glass. Cleaning up afterward is undignified.”
“Is this literal or metaphoric?”
Lydia looked at me a long time, then she sighed. “Sam, all your life I’ve never been able to decide if you walk around with your head in the clouds or up your ass.”
Hank balanced on the truck’s back bumper to strap a blue tarp over the amassed possessions. Even though Lydia’s saddle purse and bottle of water were already in place in the front seat, ready to take to the highway, this driving into the sunset thing still didn’t seem real to me, I guess because it’s hard to conceive of your mother as a fugitive from justice.
“Wait a day so you don’t miss Pete’s funeral,” I said.
Lydia had found a blue-and-yellow necktie left over from her Annie Hall phase. She held the folded tie up to my neck to check the color coordination between it and my skin. “I never was much for funerals,” she said. “Tell Maurey and Chet we’re sorry we couldn’t be there.”
I appealed to Hank. “What’s a day going to matter?”
Hank grunted from the strain of tightening the rope around the tarp.
Lydia said, “Women’s prisons are grossly underfunded. They must be avoided at all costs.” She stuffed the necktie into my coat pocket. “Have Maurey tie it, you’ll botch the job if you do it yourself.”
This was happening too fast. It seemed wrong to have finally made up with my mother, sort of, anyway, and fifteen minutes later lose her for God knows how long. We should be bonding or interfacing or whatever being nice is called these days.
She said, “Leaving you in charge of the house doesn’t mean some woman can waltz in here and change everything. I want the walls where I left them.”
“I’m done with women.”
“I’ll believe that when moose fly.”
Then Lydia did something completely uncharacteristic. She hugged me. I felt her head on my shoulder and her arms on my back. She was thinner than I’d imagined, and she smelled a bit like ink.
“Take care of yourself out there in the underground,” I said.
She leaned back with her hands on my elbows and looked into my face. “I’ll be fine. The government’s not big enough to touch women like me. You take care of my granddaughter.”
“I will.”
“Promise me you won’t raise her the way I raised you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
After Lydia got into the truck, Hank came around and hugged me too. It didn’t feel a bit weird.
“Feed the horses while I’m gone,” he said.
“Maurey’s not going to be happy,” I said.
“You’ll have to take my place.”
“Yeah, right.”
Hank grinned. “Nach-ki-tach-sa-po-auach-kach-pinna.”
“What’s that?”
“Blackfoot for ‘Keep your nose clean.’”
I stood in the snow, watching Hank’s truck slowly drive away. Just before he turned west onto the Yellowstone Highway, an arm came from the passenger’s window, fingers fluttered a good-bye wave, then they were gone.
Maurey was more than unhappy over Hank going underground with Lydia.
“We’re talking last straw,” she said.
I stood there, hands at my sides, wondering how I could save her. These crises are the times I’m supposed to take command.
Anger flashed in her eyes. “Who’s going to run the ranch?”
“It could be worse. I’ve lost my mother. Temporarily anyway.”
“I need Hank a lot more than you need a mother.”
That was true. At my age, a mother is more symbolic than nurturing, not that mine ever was nurturing. “I can help with the ranch.”
Maurey made a nasal sound indicating minor disgust. “Sam, this is a horse ranch; you’re afraid of horses.”
I hate it when people say that. “The ranch isn’t only a horse ranch. I can fix fence, and I’ve always wanted to learn irrigation. Moving water where it’s needed seems like a satisfying way to spend your time.”
Maurey sat in her stuffed rocking chair and stared at a spot in the air several feet in front of and slightly below her face. She said, “I have to call my sponsor.”
“Your sponsor?”
“Go find Pud. He needs your help in the hay shed.”
“Are you turning to God?” I asked.
“I’m turning to the telephone. You go help Pud and don’t come back for a couple of hours.”
Here’s my problem with Pud: Today, he seems nice enough and Maurey loves him and she’s past that stage women go through where they fall in love with creeps, so he must be okay, but way back when Pud was seven or eight his mother told him to drown a litter of kittens. As an alternative to drowning, Pud decided to let his God-ugly dog kill them. Maurey and I came upon the gory scene, there was a fight, the dog bit me, I bit the dog, and in the end we saved one kitten. That kitten was Alice, my closest pal for the next eighteen years.
Okay. Pud had excuses. He was only a child and his family was a bunch of ignorant yahoos, and back then everyone thought Pud was retarded so they treated him cruelly. I understand the excuses; but the fact is I can’t forget he once fed kittens to a dog. That was the same winter Lydia told me the rape story. People who can’t forget lead fetid lives.
I found Pud in the barn, grooming the stud.
“Molly’s in the hay,” Pud said. “We fed her three Marches ago when the snow was nose deep and the elk were starving, and now she thinks we owe her lunch all winter.”
“She’s a welfare chiseler elk,” I said.
“There’s a lesson to be learned, I guess.”
As Pud and I walked in silence up the sled track to the shed, it dawned on me for the hundredth time that I owed it to Maurey to be friends with him. Or, at least, friendly. They’d been together six years and Pud and I had yet to carry on a conversation between just the two of us.
I wasn’t certain where to begin. “Pud,” I said, “how’d you come to get into the satellite dish repair business?”
He was as surprised to hear me ask as I was to be asking. He kind of slid the corners of his eyes at me to see if I was putting him on. “Maurey and I were up the Ramshorn one July, delivering horses to the Bar Double R, and they had a dish. I didn’t even know what it was.”
“And that’s how you decided on a career?”
“I decided on a career when I saw eight full-grown cowboys hanging on every word of Jeopardy. Those old men had lived long, happy lives without TV, but three weeks after putting in the dish, they were junkies.”
“So, you look at your job as servicing junkies?”
“Heck, you should see the panic when a bandpass filter goes down. I charge seventy an hour, including travel time, which can be four or five hours back in the mountains.”
This was a bigger scam than golf carts.
“I could get two hundred if I wanted,” Pud said, “but that would be gouging.” He slid his eyes over at me again. “I’m no gouger.”
“I believe you.”
The hay shed wasn’t a shed in the North Carolina sense of the word. It was actually a large roof, larger than the roof on most houses, held up by telephone pole-looking logs about twenty feet high. The summer’s hay crop—or in drought years like this one, hay bought from Idaho farmers—was stacked in bales under the roof to keep dry, and a twelve-foot double-posted mesh fence surrounded the hay to keep out horses, porcupines, deer, moose, and elk, and anything else with a taste for grass.
The system worked fairly well except when someone forgot to close the gate properly, which is what happened the day Pete died. An elk—Molly—had gone through the fence and was eating her way around the stack, costing the ranch money it didn’t have to spare.
Pud stationed me just inside the open gate, which wasn’t any more a real gate than the shed was a real shed. It was a section of fence held in by push screws. Each side of the enclosure had a removable section so Hank could take bales from anywhere without having a long haul.
“Stand here and when she comes your way, turn her out the open hole,” Pud said.
“Turn her?”
“Only don’t get under her feet. Molly’s stomped three cow-dogs to death in her career.”
“How do I turn her without getting under her feet?”
“Wave your arms and holler.”
“She’s bigger than me.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
Pud walked off counterclockwise around the hay bales. From the northwest corner, Molly raised her head and chewed a mouthful of hay. She regarded me disdainfully—with good reason. She was wild, strong, and noble. I wasn’t. That animal knew I wasn’t bigger than her. She wasn’t stupid.
I looked across the white pasture to the river and wondered idly if I was fixing to get killed. The thought didn’t disturb me as much as I would have expected. Mostly, I considered the uniqueness in a modern society of being killed by a wild animal. I always wanted to go out in a unique way. I also thought about how lousy Shannon would feel. She would wonder if her desertion last night caused me to flaunt risks.
“Scat! Move it!” Pud’s voice came from around the corner of the stack.
Molly ignored him. Six-hundred-pound animals don’t respond to Scat.
A firecracker exploded at Molly’s feet. Pop. She jumped back and hit the fence, but didn’t move any closer to me. A string of firecrackers went off—Pop! Pop! PopPop! Molly walked ten feet or so down the aisle toward me, enough to clear the line of fire, then she stopped and went back to feeding.
Pud appeared on the far side of the elk. “Black Cats aren’t motivational enough,” he said.
By leaning toward the fence, I could see him working something out of his coat pocket. Pud is wiry and no taller than me. I’d always thought Maurey didn’t love me in the romantic way because I wasn’t tall, so it came as a shock when she took a boyfriend my size.
“Pud,” I said, “when we were kids, everyone thought you were retarded. Why was that?”
He stopped fiddling with whatever he’d been fiddling with and looked at me. “I’m dyslexic.”
His eyes have always been so soft and open, not angry like Dothan’s, that I used to suspect something other than a demented home life made him different.
He went on. “I couldn’t learn to read. My family and everyone treated me like a retard, so I believed them.”
“I remember how mean the kids were to you at school.”
“Maurey had me tested. All those years I thought I was stupider than everyone else, and then I found out I wasn’t.”
“Must have had an amazing effect on your self-image.”
“Like waking up and discovering you’re a different person.” He held up a round object. “You ready?”
“For what?”
“Cherry bomb.”
I glanced from him to Molly. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Her nose reacted first. The nostrils flared and her head jerked, then BLAM!—thirty times louder than a Black Cat. She leaped backward into the fence and bounced and came down running. I doubt if Molly even saw me before the collision. Her eyes were panicky wild, bugging pink whites and huge pupils. It happened way too fast for me to wave my hands and holler, or be smart and climb the fence. I think her inside shoulder hit me; whatever it was, I flew into the hay and she went out the fence gap.
Pud pulled me to my feet. “That was great,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have stood my ground like you did.”
After a few minutes, my lungs accepted air and my vision cleared somewhat. I almost convinced myself I’d been brave from choice; maybe I did stand my ground; maybe I had had time to jump. Bravery isn’t what you do so much as how you look back at what you did. I was so happy about surviving Molly, I tripped over barbwire under the snow and cut the living bejesus out of my hand.
So I walked into the living room with my fist above my head, clenching a hard-packed snowball. The blood trickled down my arm and off my elbow.
Maurey was still on the phone. She took one look at me and said, “I have to go, Lloyd, there’s another emergency.” She listened a few seconds and said, “I’ll call you back.”
After she hung up I said, “You didn’t have to stop on account of me.”
“I’m supposed to chat while you bleed on the floor?”
Maurey got up and led me into the kitchen, where she kept one of the most complete first-aid kits a nonprofessional ever owned. It filled an old army mule pannier. A lot of doctors must have dried out on the TM because Maurey was prepared for any emergency. She had me stand at the sink and run cold water over the cut. It was at the base of my thumb and hard to see, what with the flow of blood, but there seemed to be a penny-size skin flap over a deep, ragged hole.
“This’ll take stitches,” Maurey said.
“Should we call an ambulance?”
“I can handle it.”
She dug through the pannier and came up with a sealed Baggie containing a sponge and this frothy brown liquid. As she leaned over my hand, her hair fell across her line of vision and she brushed it back over her ear in my favorite Maurey gesture.
“Was that your sponsor on the phone?” I asked.
She nodded. “Lloyd. Have you had a tetanus shot lately?”
“Last year when a Vicksburg battery mount fell on my foot. Am I supposed to know Lloyd?”
“Yes, you dip.” The brown liquid was some kind of alcohol and it hurt like the dickens. I gritted my teeth as Maurey scrubbed and talked. “I’ve told you about Lloyd and Sharon Carbonneau at least twenty times. They own a sports paraphernalia shop in Denver.”
Even though the pain was tremendous, I resolved to follow the expected male code of toughness. “Sports paraphernalia?”
“Caps and coolers. You can make a killing off any piece of plastic with a Denver Broncos logo on the side.”
“‘Sponsor’ is an AA term, isn’t it?”
“Your sponsor is the person you turn to when you’re in trouble.”
“That makes you my sponsor.”
She gave one last squeeze of brown antiseptic. “Are you still in trouble, sugar booger?”
Was I in trouble, or was this despair the daily routine of going on? “Shannon’s moving out,” I said.
Holding my sterile hand palm up, Maurey led me back to the kitchen table. “I know.”
“She always tells you everything before me.”
Maurey found a preloaded syringe and broke off the seal. “Shannon’s worried. She thinks you’ll fall apart without her at home to fuss over.”
I stared at the syringe. Nobody had told me about a shot. “What did you advise?”
“I said, ‘Birds gotta fly.’ If you fall apart that’s your fault. She can’t spend her whole life being needy so you have something to do.”
When Shannon was little we had this ritual where I came in every night to tuck her into bed. The covers would be an awful mess and I would say, “What would you do without me?” and she would say, “Freeze in my sleep,” or something to that effect. But then one night I went into her room in my socked feet and found her reading Yertle the Turtle in a perfectly tucked bed. She didn’t see me at the door, so I returned to my room, put on shoes, and clumped back up the hall. When I re-entered Shannon’s bedroom, the covers were tangled up around her feet.
I couldn’t decide if the trick to make me feel needed was touching or manipulative. Either way, finding out the truth took some of the glow off night-night.
“This may sting,” Maurey said, and she stabbed me right in the cut.
“Aighgh! Jesus!”
“What a wienie,” she said.
“Wienie? Let me poke a hole in you and see how it feels.”
“Hank didn’t scream when I deadened his wrist.”
“Hank’s stoic. It runs in his genes.”
“Wieniehood runs in your genes. That’ll numb up in a minute.”
My pain threshold has never been up to cowboy standards. The Callahan nerves are more sensitive than theirs, I think. Some people can see or hear better than other people, it only follows that senses of touch vary also, and mine is highly developed.
“Doctors just give you all these medical supplies?”
“They leave things with me when they go away.”
Another plastic bag held a curved needle, like cobblers use on shoe soles, pre-threaded from a little bobbin of nylon thread. I said, “A doctor recovers from alcoholism and he’s so grateful he leaves behind a home clinic.”
Maurey held the needle between her thumb and index finger as she studied my cut. “Actually, this particular doctor committed suicide.”
She slid the needle into the flap and pulled it out of clean skin. It felt icky. No pain—just icky, like the ultimate in fingernails across a blackboard. “He couldn’t live with or without alcohol,” she went on, “so he hung himself in the barn.”
“And you kept his stuff.”
Maurey tied a complicated knot by dipping the needle through a loop and turning it sideways or something. I couldn’t follow the process. Afterward she snipped the thread and went back into my thumb for a second stitch.
Without looking up, she said, “Pud asked me to marry him.”
“Ouch!”
“Don’t jerk your hand while the needle’s in it.”
“You purposely waited until I was helpless to break the news.”
“I was going to tell you. He only asked last night.”
“I hope you said no.”
Maurey drew the thread through and tied the knot. She pretended to be concentrating so hard I knew she wasn’t concentrating at all. She could easily have sewn my fingers together.
“I said okay.”
“Okay? The kid asks you to marry him and all you can say is ‘Okay.’ Isn’t that a bit halfhearted?”
“Don’t be tacky with me, Sam.”
“But you already married one Talbot and he was a shit.”
“I’ve got the good brother this time.”
Maurey and I had been best friends since before puberty. I thought we would always be the way we had always been, with our romantic lives a hobby we take seriously, but nevertheless, still a hobby. The nuclear family would always be each other.
“You’ve lived with Pud for years. Why change what works?”
Maurey pulled the third stitch. “Why are you freaking out?”
“I think he’s taking advantage of your vulnerability over losing Pete.”
She tied the knot hard and snipped the loose end with her scissors in a crisp snip of anger.
“You’ve been married twice.”
“But that was different. Neither of those women was as vital to me as you are.”
“And they knew that. I don’t blame them for hating me. Did it ever occur to you that maybe—just maybe—putting me first over your wives had something to do with why your marriages failed?”
“They were both emotional cripples. It had nothing to do with you.”
Maurey’s eyes met mine fiercely. “Pud is my partner, Sam. My mate. You are my very good friend. You are important, yet secondary.”
“But we always said friends matter more than lovers.”
“You always said that. Pud is the number-one man in my life, Sam. You have to accept that.”
“Fat chance.”
I kicked on my cross-country skis and headed up the creek. Got to get away. Got to go. Movement eases turmoil. The warm days earlier in the week had softened the snow and today’s cold hardened it, so basically I was skiing on ice. I fell twice before the back fence. A single rail showed above the snow and it was easy to sidestep over. Once across, I made my way into the aspens, where the going was a bit easier.
How could she do this to me? When I got married I didn’t flaunt my true love in her face. I didn’t call her secondary. The first time I sent a postcard: “Got married. Wish you were here.” The second time, Shannon told her.
When Wanda ran off with the illiterate pool man I thought I had a rock-solid support system—mother, daughter, closest friend—stable as a three-legged stool. Okay, the mother wasn’t too supportive, but I knew where she was. If I felt like talking to her, all I had to do was hold on to a check for a couple of days. I never dreamed Shannon would leave so soon. Maybe if I’d stayed in Greensboro after the Katrina fiasco she wouldn’t have discovered how easy I am to live without.
What was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to North Carolina. The Manor House would be an empty tomb without Shannon. Besides, I’d had it with golf carts and serial sex. Gilia changed all that.
For sure, I couldn’t stay in my cell at the TM Ranch forever. Spring would come; Madame Bovary would eat arsenic and die; Maurey would marry Pud.
What I ought to do was move to a small Western town and find a log cabin within walking distance of a video store and a coffee shop, and do nothing for ten years but write novels. Not teenage sports fiction, but literature—Death in Steamboat Springs, Bucky Redux, a rewrite of the New Testament. I would be as serious as Richard Ford. Psychiatrists and doctors take sick people and bring them up to normal. I could take normal and make it better. My readers would stop being miserable; they would tolerate themselves and each other.
Or if that was too ambitious, I could bring Babs and Lynette to Wyoming and set them up with their own Dairy Queen. They’d like that.
The options were boundless. Almost too boundless, like the night I was left alone at the ranch and I tried to watch satellite TV. Four hundred channels gave me so many choices I spent the entire evening switching from satellite to satellite and didn’t watch anything for fear of missing something. When all choices are possible, realistic and unrealistic lose their edges. Here I was torn between writing a book that would make unhappy people happy and opening a Dairy Queen.
When had I been happy in life? When Maurey was pregnant. When Shannon was young and needed me. Looking back at the recent past, I realized helping Babs and Lynette had given me a gut-level satisfaction that had been missing lately from Young Adult novels and sex acts on lost women.
I was almost to the warm springs when I came through a gap in the aspens into a wide clearing covered by virgin snow, and I had a vision. Maybe not a vision in the Cheyenne sense, more like a waking dream—a visualization. It wasn’t something I could ever tell Maurey or Shannon about. They would laugh. Lydia would hoot.
What I saw was a log lodge with a rock chimney next to a white clinic. Individual cabins lay scattered around the clearing connected by smooth paths. Golf carts hummed quietly back and forth between the cabins and the main lodge, carrying my women. A long driveway lined by cottonwoods and red willows looped up from the ranch. At a quaint wooden bridge spanning the brook, a tastefully small sign read Callahan Home for Unwed Mothers.
Why not? I could hire nurses. We’d need a helicopter for hospital runs, but, hell, I had money. Nothing on Earth sounded nicer than to surround myself with pregnant teenagers.
A doughnut of green clover about three feet wide encircles the warm springs all winter. The north side of the doughnut is the actual spring, which steams from the earth like a scene from Shakespeare—one of those Scottish moors haunted by witches. The hot water gurgles into a moss-lined pool, thigh deep at its deepest point, then, already cooling, it empties west into Miner Creek. The Miner Creek approach involves skiing across a log high above the rocks and ice, so my rest and meditation spot was on the east side, the gentle bank.
I popped boots off bindings and planted my skis upright in the snow, then I sat on the clover and waited. I didn’t touch the water. When you first start visiting a warm springs on a regular basis, you check the temperature each time you return to see if the water really is as warm as you remember it. The TM spring was a tad cooler than I like bath water, warm enough to melt the surrounding snow but not so hot as to scald the tropical fish Maurey and other kids had released into it over the years. Back in early high school Maurey talked me into a full-moon skinny dip at twenty below zero. The water itself was cozy, warm and foggy as a Jacuzzi, but the seconds between leaving the water and drying off were among the most painful of my childhood. Seeing her naked was not worth hypothermia.
I came to the warm springs mainly for the dirt. Winter in Jackson Hole may be beautiful and spare beyond the Eastern Time Zone conception of beauty, but several months with no sight of dirt leaves me weird.
So I sat on the clover with my fingers in the dirt, watching tiny goldfish dart around the shallows’ muck, my energy at an all-time low. I was too exhausted to be depressed. The truth is I’m only good for one intense, spine-wrenching emotional blowout a year, and when the scenes come stacked up on one another some sort of morphine response kicks in. My brain goes numb; my muscles fill up with lactic acid.
The high whine of a snowmobile wafted in from back along the fenceline, and I realized I’d been holding my breath, waiting for it. Maurey arrived in a powder blue snowsuit, gold metal-flake helmet, and her father’s old Mickey Mouse boots. I averted my eyes as she dismounted. I heard her shake out her hair and wade down the snowbank, then felt her sit beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. I underhand tossed a pebble into the water and we both took what life lessons we could from the concentric, spreading ripples.
“You knew I would come,” she said.
“Yes.”
Our shoulders were a half-inch apart. I sat cross-legged while Maurey stretched her legs in a V. She leaned back on her hands and said, “Remember the day I fell in the creek and went into labor?”
“I’ve never been that scared since.” Maurey broke her leg, Shannon was born, and I became a father three weeks before my fourteenth birthday.
Maurey exhaled a sigh. The fog from her breath looked like punctuation. “Sam, it’s time we got a divorce.”
I said, “I know. It’s a pain in the ass.”
Maurey pulled off her left glove and laced her fingers into mine. “You think you’re incapable of loving a woman, and you blame Lydia, but maybe the problem isn’t her, maybe it’s my fault.”
“You’re honest with me, I’m honest with you. How could there be a problem?”
“There’s worse things than dishonesty, Sam.”
My automatic response was cynical, but I clamped down before it got out.
Maurey said, “Ever since we were kids, we’ve had each other, so neither of us has had to learn how to take care of ourselves.”
A flock of small black birds twittered through the willows across the creek, making the bushes seem to crawl in a DT effect. I looked from the birds to the fish to Maurey’s hand in mine.
“I have this test I give myself,” I said, “whenever I fall for a new woman. I pretend she and I are about to be married. The families are there in their best clothes, the minister stands with his back to the cross, the organist breaks into the ‘Wedding March,’ and you telephone to ask if I want to go out for coffee.”
“Why wasn’t I invited to the wedding?”
“If I say no to you, I don’t want to go for coffee right now, it proves I’m serious about the woman. Falling for her is for real.”
There was a moment’s quiet, then Maurey said, “That’s either silly or sick. Give me a minute to decide which.” She used her right hand, the hand I wasn’t holding, to brush hair behind her ear. “Tell me, how many have you married in this fantasy?”
“None. Not even the two I married in reality.”
“That is not silly. It is definitely sick.”
A face appeared in the steam over the spring—a face with high cheekbones and a freckle between the bridge of the nose and her right eye. I said, “Gilia.”
“What?”
“I’d rather marry Gilia than go to coffee with you.” I tossed a handful of pebbles, many concentric and overlapping circles. “But I blew that one.”
Maurey and I went into our respective funks. It seemed to me that we were embarking on something inordinately stupid. We were chopping up our one dependable crutch. Friendship is so much healthier than other crutches—alcohol or TV or religious fanaticism. One healthy crutch shouldn’t be against the rules.
“What exactly does this divorce mean?” I asked. “Are we still friends?”
She squeezed my hand hard, then let go. “Of course we’re still friends. It just means we’re no longer next of kin. We no longer save each other every time there’s a crisis. The next woman breaks your heart, you have to handle it without me.”
“There won’t be a next woman.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m finished with romance.”
“You could no more do without romance than air.”
I decided not to fight with her. This would be a conversation to dwell on in my old age. I didn’t want to dwell on a fight.
“What else?” I asked.
Maurey leaned toward the warm springs. “I can’t accept any more of your money.”
Dothan’s ugly taunts ran through my mind. The gossip I’d heard and ignored. The fears I’d been afraid to think.
I looked at her. “Is money all you used me for?”
Maurey swung her right arm and punched me in the face.
“Ow!”
“How dare you say that, you snot. When Daddy died and Dothan took Auburn, I’d never have survived without you.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“This split-up is just as hard on me as it is on you, you stupid jerk.”
I held both hands over my nose. “You hurt me.”
“I meant to hurt you.”
“Is my nose bleeding?”
She tipped my face to view the damage. “Six stitches should do it. Maybe seven.”
I looked down at my hands. No blood. “Before we go apart, would you do me one last favor?” I asked.
“It better have nothing to do with sex.”
“Let me pay Pete’s bills, the doctors and funeral.”
She frowned. “Wouldn’t that be hypocritical? To say ‘No more—after this last time’?”
“It’s as much for Pete and Chet as it is for you.”
She regarded me with her blue eyes. The first time I saw Maurey I was amazed at her blue eyes and black hair—like Hitler. Twenty years of history passed between us as we stared at one another. Twenty years of shared parenthood. I couldn’t believe it was over, we would be casual from now on.
Maurey nodded once, to herself, and smiled. She said, “Okay.”
A letter arrived the next morning:
Dear Mr. Callahan,
Rory Paseneaux returned to claim his position as head of the household and he is PO’ed because me and Babs named you as the father of our babies. He went so far as to talk to the woman at the hospital and she told him it is too late to change the papers.
Rory has said we can not have any more to do with you, even me, and if you come around he will kick your butt.
We also can not cover for you with your girlfriends any more. We have to call Sam and Sammi by their middle names which are Lynn and Babs.
So that is that. I thank you for what you did for us and I know Babs would too if she was allowed.
With respects,
Lynette Norloff
P.S. Rory Paseneaux did allow one thing. He says your lawyer can keep paying our rent.
Something kind of nasty happened before Pete’s funeral. I was standing outside the Episcopal Church, on the sidewalk that had been cleared by a snow blower, talking to Chet and three of Pete’s friends from New York City while Maurey and Pud parked the Suburban. The friends were nice-looking young men in New York City suits and shoes. I got the feeling they had been Ivy Leaguers because I couldn’t tell them apart.
Dothan Talbot drove past, slowly, with the Denver bimbo scooted so close she was behind the steering wheel. He stared at me in this challenging look of his where he lowers his pointy chin and glares out the tops of his eyeballs. That look used to make Lauren Bacall incredibly alluring, but it did nothing at all for Dothan.
I ignored him and went on talking to the New Yorkers about the color of snow in Manhattan and the odds of them seeing a bear. One of the guys said it’s not the temperature that makes you cold, it’s the humidity. Chet lit a cigarette. Pretty soon Dothan cruised back the other way. The bimbo had a possessive scowl on her face, probably because married women fooling around are the most jealous creatures on Earth. I didn’t envy Dothan a bit.
He eased his truck up to the curb next to me, got out, and slammed the door. The three New Yorkers instinctively sensed tension and leaned away. I doubt if Wyoming men would have been that sensitive to the possibility of ugliness.
Dothan’s voice dripped with smugness. He said, “I always knew you’d end up with the fairies.”
I glanced at Pete’s friends to see how they handled being called fairies. Their faces had gone mask. I said, “Who are you trying to insult, Dothan, me or them?”
“I’m not trying to insult anyone. I came to pay my last respects to Maurey’s queer brother.”
I slugged Dothan in the stomach. He doubled over and I hit him in the face, then he was down on the snow and I was kicking him.
I lost control, which is something I’d never done before. A kidney stomp immobilized him long enough for me to go for the head. There was a rush of memories—of Sonny and Ryan beating me up in October; of Dothan beating me up in the seventh grade; of him fucking Maurey when I couldn’t; of Maurey, Shannon, and Lydia dismissing me. I kicked the living bejesus out of that bastard.
Then hands were pulling me off him and the bimbo was screaming. The New Yorkers looked aghast. I guess they weren’t used to personal violence.
Chet was saying, “He’s not worth it, Sam. Back off.”
Maurey was saying, “You split your stitches, tiger.”
She borrowed handkerchiefs from the New Yorkers and wrapped my hand tightly. I watched Dothan’s woman hold his head in her lap and pat his lips with snow. His eyes blinked, but didn’t focus.
As we walked into the church, Maurey said, “I wish you’d let me get to him first.”
“It was my turn.”
“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; even so saith the spirit, for they rest from their labors.”
The priest, whose name was Father Jack, held his arms out about sternum high, with the thumbs and forefingers made into Os. Blond beard, thinning hair, thick forearms—Father Jack looked like Edward Abbey in a ghost costume.
“The Lord be with you,” he said.
Chet and a smattering of people at the back said, “And with thy spirit.”
“Let us pray.”
Chet kneeled and after a few false starts, the rest of us followed. Chet was Episcopalian, which was why we were having the funeral service in the Episcopal Church. That, and AA met in the parish hall, so Maurey knew Father Jack. But the rest of us in the family’s pews weren’t Episcopalian, or much of any other denomination, so we were lost when it came time to sit, kneel, or stand. On top of saying good-bye to his partner, Chet must have felt like he was leading a very slow aerobics class.
The church was a dark log building with two lines of pews wide enough for four people or five if they scrunched up. Pud sat against the north window with Roger at his side. Then it went Auburn, Maurey, Chet, the aisle, me, Shannon in her new outfit, and Toinette. Dot Pollard was behind me, with the three friends from New York behind her.
The rest of the church was maybe three-quarters full of Pete’s high school friends and people who go to funerals to prove they’re not dead yet. I heard sniffling from the far back and sneaked a look to see who it was—Ron Mildren, being glared at by his wife, Gloria.
Pete was in the bois d’arc box with ivory inlay on top of a walnut table a few feet in front of Chet. My theory that dead people know what’s going on around them for four days after they die applies just as much to ashes as bodies. Pete knew what I was thinking, so I’d best be careful.
Father Jack announced he was going to read to us from the Book of Job. Not my favorite book. God tests Job by killing his children, then says, “You passed. Here, have some more children.” If God killed Shannon, then said, “That was a test, I’ll replace her,” I would say, “Forget it, you jerk.”
As the Father read, “And though after my skin worms destroy this body,” I leaned forward to check out the front pew’s handle on the grief process. As usual in groups, I felt responsible for everyone’s peace of mind. Roger sat pale and unblinking; Auburn was restless. Chet was tremendously sad, yet he had dignity. He didn’t jump up and bash the priest in the mouth, which is what I probably would have done.
Maurey looked both beautiful and beat up by life. Her eyes were muddy and the scar on her chin seemed whiter, but she was still concerned about the others. One hand touched Chet’s shoulder and the other arm extended over Auburn and rested on Roger’s leg.
Shannon’s shoulder touched mine; I leaned my weight toward her in case she needed support.
Job’s part ended and Toinette went to the front with her viola. She played a wonderfully wistful song I’d never heard before, which she told me later was a “Romanze” by Max Bruch. Toinette’s face was golden and her belly was huge. When she ran her bow across the viola strings, they seemed not so much to weep in the tragic keening of a violin, but to cry out a deeper, more elemental pain. The viola mourned not only Pete, but all loss everywhere. After Toinette finished, she gave Father Jack a shy smile and walked to her pew, and he sat there on his bench, looking poleaxed.
Shannon put her fingers over my good hand.
After that, Father Jack read another Bible verse, this one from Revelations, the book hippies used to quote in North Carolina. I tried to follow, but when he read the part about no more death, sorrow, crying, or pain, I drifted off. I’m not sure a world with no pain at all would be that desirable. The boredom would be debilitating. I could write a novel about it sometime.
When Maurey and Pete were kids their mother drove them into Jackson to the Baptist Church every Sunday while their father went fishing or hunting or read detective stories by the woodstove. If anyone asked Buddy where you go after you die, he always said, “San Francisco.” It was a family proverb: Stick by Mom and spend eternity in heaven or stick with Dad and go to San Francisco. His version made as much sense as heaven. What good are streets of gold?
Shannon jabbed an elbow in my ribs. Everyone was looking at me. Maurey mouthed, “Go on up.”
The eulogy. In the excitement of the last couple of days, I’d forgotten the eulogy.
Father Jack said, “Mr. Callahan.”
I was careful not to touch anything because my hand was starting to throb and I was afraid blood might ooze through the handkerchiefs and stain the oiled wood of the pulpit or the cloth that hung over the top. I said, “I met Pete Pierce the day President Kennedy was killed.”
Chet stared at me, unblinking. So did Roger, but his unblinking face sucked in light while Chet’s glowed with emotion. Like the difference between the moon and a black hole.
Nothing to do but plow ahead. “Pete must have been six or seven. He wanted to watch cartoons, but they weren’t on because of the assassination coverage. He and Maurey got into a fight and she smacked him in the nose.”
Maurey was frowning. It seemed awfully important not to disappoint her in this, which meant the story had to go somewhere, mean something.
“I realized then how a family works; the members of a family may fight like cats and dogs, and they almost never understand what the others want or feel, or who they are, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the love that flows without reservation. Without doubt.”
Father Jack shifted his weight on the bench. I wondered what he thought of us behind that beard. Was it just another day’s work for him, like me at the golf cart plant?
“What else do I remember about Pete?” I asked myself and the congregation. Had to be something. “His mother. When Pete’s mother was sick all those years, he took care of her. Pete loved his mother very much.”
The people looked up at me, expecting more. I hadn’t yet said enough to quit. “After she died, he went to New York City and got a job in the theater, managing lights for plays and musicals.”
Chet had stopped watching me and was staring at the box of ashes. His eyes were striking. They showed more than the grief of separation. You could see that he’d received something permanent from Pete, something I had never felt with a woman—friend or lover. It came to me that the funeral wasn’t for Pete; it was for Chet.
“Pete Pierce was gay,” I said.
Maurey moved her hands into her lap. The three guys from New York rustled in their seats. I could tell from some faces farther back that not everyone had known. Instead of addressing the group, I spoke directly to Chet.
“Pete was proud of being gay, and I think that pride is why he chose me to say words about him today. He knew I wouldn’t pretend he was someone he wasn’t. He knew I wouldn’t skip over one of the central elements of his life.”
Almost imperceptibly, Chet nodded. I knew I was going in the right direction.
“We can’t talk about who Pete was without acknowledging his love for Chet, here. They were partners, mates. Lovers in every sense of the word.”
Chet’s lips parted in almost, but not quite, a smile.
I said, “His love for Chet was the truth that made Pete feel unique.”
I looked at Pud over against the window. His face was turned ever so slightly toward Maurey’s, and hers toward him.
“A person would like to think his or her life has significance,” I said.
Shannon’s face was turned to the window, as if she were listening to something outside the rest of us couldn’t hear. She was daydreaming.
“To me, significance means to love, and to be cherished, and to impact creatively the world—large or small—that one occupies. Pete found significance. Through his work and his love he left a legacy that will live into the future with each of us he touched.”
I turned to Father Jack. “Where’s the nearest phone?”
He shifted forward on the bench, confusion in his eyes. “The church offices. Next door.”
I left by the door behind the pulpit. Crossing the snowy yard, I saw that Dothan and the bimbo were gone. Love wasn’t everything. Neither was friendship and family. What I wanted and couldn’t get, even from the three legs of my support stool, was someone to take my dreams seriously.
Gilia answered on the third ring.
“Hello.”
“What do you think of a home for unwed mothers? We could run it. You and I.”
There was a long silence and quiet breathing, then Gilia said, “Where?”