Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  I sip my juice and think about the enormity of Bo’s experience. I try on the new idea he has suggested. “Like there is a balance of something similar to red and white corpuscles in the activity of life. Is that what you mean? A kind of immune system in the energy field?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” He looks past me, out the window again. “I just figured it was like when I was a kid on the playground and got scared on top of the high slide. If I backed down the steps, I wouldn’t grow up like the rest of the guys. I’d be left behind, still scared.”

  “And they’d make fun of you.”

  “In this case I’d have plenty of company. A lot of people don’t follow their dreams. But you’d go on without me.”

  My heart soars when I hear these words. We kiss softly, barely touching, our heads lying back against the airplane seats.

  “Don’t cry,” Bo whispers. He smiles. “The stewardess will blame me.” He wipes his thumb under each of my eyes. “She’ll think I stole your peanuts.”

  The man sitting behind the lady with the Post-it in her hair tries to pluck it off. His hand surreptitiously moves closer; his arm shoots out and back in false starts before he gives up.

  Something that’s been helpful to me comes to mind. “Your friend Mick Farlow told a story at your barbecue last fall. Maybe you’ve heard it. He said in boot camp he was taught to think FIDO: Fuck it, drive on. I use it now when I get stuck. The idea is to just keep the flow going.”

  My mind imagines five years down the road when I might rant to Bo about how tired I am that he just fucks it and drives on whenever we have trouble. I look out the window and smile to myself. I hope I have that problem.

  Bo says, “What are you thinking?”

  I say, “Maybe one of the best deals in life is getting the problems you love to solve.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You promised we’d get to argue on the plane,” I tease. “You keep agreeing with me.”

  The man ahead leans up in his seat, preparing to make a surprise charge on the pink Post-it. I alert Bo to the drama. Slowly, the man aims his index finger and thumb toward the bobbing sticker. He’s practically there. He’s so close. Abruptly, the lady swings her head to the side, and the man jumps in surprise.

  Bo and I laugh.

  As we talk more, I realize Bo has given a lot of thought to who I am, who he is and how our differences will come together. He says to me now, “Not everybody thinks life is to be lived the right way, like you do.”

  “Of course they do. People try to live the most right way they can,” I say. “And if they are not successful, they feel horrible about it.”

  “That’s how you run your life. And why, incidentally, you grind your teeth in your sleep.”

  “I do not.” I have to do something so unglamorous our first two nights together?

  “You’re hard on yourself, Zann.”

  It’s true. I’ve always carried a kind of pride about being conscientious. I want to get it…right.

  He says, “My point is that this isn’t the goal of everyone. This is a personality thing. It’s…maybe it’s a spiritual thing, with you.”

  In order to appear openminded I ask, “What other goal is as valid?”

  “Mine’s not a bad one.”

  “You have a goal?” This is a relief.

  “Experiencing. Being. Being here.”

  “This sounds like a great excuse to do nothing.” Please, I’m so happy. Don’t tell me you are a shapeless mass of urges, heading nowhere. Arguing involves more danger than I meant to gamble.

  Way at the end of the aisle, the attendants begin to hand out meals. The pink Post-it has now fallen between the lady’s back and her seat, out of reach even for the plucky man behind her.

  “Being alert is hard work…if hard work is what you admire. I haven’t always been good at being alert. Sometimes I drink a lot of beer…just to give myself a vacation.” Bo watches the progress of the meal cart. “But that’s my motivation—being alert—and it just seems to me that you ought to know that not everyone is motivated by the same thing you are—being right.”

  Inside myself, I feel as if my soul just turned sideways behind my eyes. The view is sharply altered. If not everyone is consciously or unconsciously trying to live the right way, then I’m an oddity. And not even a superior oddity. I’m just encased in one more restricted perspective, just another follower of rigid law. I didn’t mean this. I meant to sweep widely for my beliefs, deal from a panorama of truths.

  Bo just wants to be awake.

  “I have a friend, Joe Budds, who was gored almost fatally by a Brahma bull years ago,” Bo says. “It was during the Stampede, the rodeo in Calgary. I was an outrider in the chuck wagon races and got to him first. Joe had stopped breathing. I leaned down to start blowing into his mouth, and Joe’s eyes flew open and he whispered, ‘Shit. We’re wasting our time with a bunch of ideas.’ Before he lost consciousness again he said, ‘Just live it, buddy.’”

  “Rodeo religion,” I say. “Cowboy nihilism.”

  Bo says, “You’re missing the point, Zann.”

  “The point is,” I say, “that there is no point.”

  “Right,” Bo agrees. “A natural state of living takes over during heightened pain or fear, even joy, and it isn’t dependent on any theories—right ones included. It just is what it is.”

  No one has ever engaged in argument like this with me before, and I have longed for it. “You mean reason has less to do with being than I think it does.”

  “I’m talking about a quality of attention. Whereas you are talking about a quality of intention. I recognize your high morality and I admire it, but I’m suggesting you don’t judge me with the same harshness you judge yourself. We have different motivations.”

  I’m pretty pleased to discover Bo has a motivation. Underlying that is this lump in my throat, and I don’t think it has to do with Bo’s tone of voice, which is gentle but pointed. I suspect Bo is right, yet I thought we were assigned the job of becoming one with the highest idea of perfection we could conceive. I am jolted considerably to learn this may not be true.

  I feel choked up and my eyes burn with the need to cry. I’ve never before had anyone recognize me so succinctly. Neither have I ever felt so naked, even to myself. Two teardrops break the dam of my lower lashes, yet I burst out laughing because I feel so understood.

  Bo holds me as close as seat belts and armrests and lack of privacy allow. “I admire you, Zannah. You live carefully and tenderly.”

  On the final leg of the trip, Atlanta to West Palm, we watch the sun sink. A narrow strip of light beneath the clouds tints the sky the colors of Florida’s many fruits: strawberry, melon, lime, and just before dark, the rind of grapefruit.

  twenty-five

  My mother likes Bo better than me. We just arrived last night, yet already she is whispering in his ear, asking him when I’m going to leave. Bo says, “Not for a while.” And my mother makes a face. Mostly, she sits quietly, passive and pleasant. Her fingers move in a slow, continuous busyness of touching each other or the edges of things around her. Mom has given me a gift several times today. The same gift. She gets up and opens the cupboard where she used to keep her cigarettes; she reaches inside, finds a book of matches, and presents them to me with a shy smile. I feel she is giving me something she once held dear.

  Mom goes with all her questions to Bo now instead of Dad. Dad is putting on a show of being jealous, though he is clearly enjoying the reprieve. When Mom gives me the matches again, Dad says, “She wants us to blow ourselves up, Suzannah, and leave her alone with Bo.”

  We all laugh.

  Mom says, “You’re silly.”

  She refers to Dad and Bo now as her husbands, when she can find the word. But neither of them should feel too special. I took her grocery shopping at Publix with me earlier today, and every time she spotted a man down an aisle, she took off after him and asked, “Are you my husband?” She feels much more secure with a man than
with a woman and becomes noticeably anxious when she is alone with me. Her eyes have become a cloudy blue. I don’t think they have lost color, just intent. It’s almost as if she looks at me through an unkept aquarium.

  She doesn’t play cards anymore. The deck sits on the coffee table in four tidy piles, an ace showing on the top of each, as if she finally won a game and wasn’t going to chance again the disorder of failing.

  This afternoon Bo and I walk the banks of Bessie Creek holding hands.

  “Most people probably chop out these trees for a view of the water,” Bo says. “It’s nice your Dad has kept them.”

  “The mangroves are protected by law. Only specially licensed workers can cut them. Though people sneak out at night and chop them back all the time.”

  Bo pushes aside a fern with fronds taller than he is to get closer to the water’s edge. “It’s probably a good fish hatchery down in there.” Bo looks down among the arched props of the mangroves, extending into the brackish water.

  “It’s perfect. That’s the main reason for the law.”

  I turn toward a rustle in the palmettos and spot my mother. I’m surprised to see her outside on her own. Then, inwardly, I groan. She is wearing a favorite outfit: a dirty white terry cloth sun suit and a plastic shower cap that sits low on her forehead and puffs high over her ears. Bo and I walk her back toward the house. A year ago she’d rather be shot than seen like this, but Bo escorts her as if they were heading for the dance floor at a fancy-dress ball.

  Now that I have been around a few days, I see that my father is managing as well as always, and is as determined as always to handle Mom’s care alone. But he desperately needed a break. Having Bo here allows my father to pretend it is his duty to entertain Bo and boat him around the intercoastal waterway. Every day, Dad looks more rested. However, Mom becomes more agitated with others in the house. The length of our visit will be determined by the balance of the good we do my father versus the harm we do my mother.

  Early this morning, Bo and Dad left for a fishing trip on the Lady Stuart, they have been gone all day, and won’t return home until after Mom’s bedtime. I help her undress, prompting each move. One soft moccasin slips off one foot. She studiously ponders what to do next and looks to me for guidance. I help slip off the other one. I must lie in the dark with her until she sleeps. She is restless tonight. Up on one elbow, she asks me again where her you know is. She becomes belligerent about Dad’s absence, but can’t find the words to express herself.

  I try an old trick of hers, one she used getting me to sleep. I sit on the edge of her bed and slowly trace her eyebrows with one finger. And I sing.

  When my dad comes in to wake me and take my place in his bed next to Mom’s, I realize I have been dreaming that my mother reverted to a little person. In my dream it made sense to me that since she is regressing mentally, her body will become smaller, too, and that will make her easier to care for. I thought perhaps she’d like to lay on a blanket on the floor like babies do. Then, in my dream, I glimpsed my mother’s vaginal area, labia with pubic hair, suddenly explode off from this small being and lie beside her on the blanket. Somehow I did not find the sight gory. Beside it, as well, was a piece of the back of her head, and from this, I averted my eyes.

  I feel certain my dream contains clues about my mother’s condition. But I never could decipher dreams. I’ll give this one to Tessa when I see her.

  Bo calls dreams night mail. I like that. Once I dreamed of drunk people and woke up the next morning feeling slightly hungover. Beckett told me when I last called that he dreamed I painted myself with war paint before I sat down to design jewelry. I like that, too.

  As usual since Mom’s illness, I am enveloped in pastry wrap, buffered, smiling, unshockable. Suzannah en croute. But I am aware, too, of a sodden center, enlarging as my time here goes by, gaining heaviness, solidity. Puzzled each time, I never remember this sensation from one visit to the next and spend the first few days wondering what is physically wrong with me. My father’s sodden center is causing him chest pains of late. Stress, his doctor says.

  Before breakfast this morning, I ask Bo how the fishing trip went. He says he enjoyed it.

  “Get along with my dad okay?”

  “He’s great. I like him. Had his hands on my fishing pole more than his own, but even so we caught a hell of a lot of fish.”

  “That’s my dad. You have to ditch him, if you can. As a kid I’d sneak off to the other side of the Lady Stuart and fish where he couldn’t find me.”

  Once we are all seated for breakfast, I keep glancing at my mother beside me at the table. Something is different, but I can’t tell what. Maybe I’m too close to her. I push back my chair. “Anybody want more coffee?” I raise my eyebrows at Bo with exaggeration. We’ve been whispering about my Dad’s horrible, weak coffee.

  “I’ve had plenty, thanks,” Bo says politely and gives me a look over the rim of his cup.

  Having a coconspirator in my father’s house offers more comfort than I would have guessed.

  From the kitchen counter I wait for my mother to lift her head. She’s especially quiet this morning. She chews on a card from the deck lying on the coffee table.

  “Momma? You want more coffee?” I hold the pot up in the air. Mom doesn’t respond. Usually she looks to my dad for her answers. But Dad and Bo are leaving the table. They have decided to go out and tinker with the dory’s motor. The screen door slaps behind them. My mother lifts her head to watch the men cross the yard.

  “Momma?” I set the coffeepot back. I need to double-check what I think I have seen. She lowers the card she is chewing and looks at me. Her face looks slightly lopsided. I can’t swear it, but it appears that her left eye sags. I could convince myself that it didn’t, if I wanted to. Her mouth on that side droops, too, just a bit. Yes, now I’m sure of it.

  I pull out the chair next to her and turn it to face her. “Momma? You having a hard time this morning?”

  It seems imperative that someone know what has happened to her. I think of her experiencing a stroke all alone in her bed. All alone in her head. Somewhere inside her, she knows an earthquake, a body quake, has left damage. Someone else needs to know it with her. Someone must witness for her and acknowledge what she is unable to witness and acknowledge for herself.

  I smooth her cheeks and her hair. Later, I will decide whether to tell Dad. I suspect nothing can be done. My father dressed her this morning and didn’t notice anything—perhaps he can’t let himself notice any further damage.

  “Momma?” I turn her chair so we face each other. The card is the ace of spades, and the black ink has transferred to her lips and teeth. For the first time, she looks demented to me. I fight tears. I take her hands into both of mine. They feel chilled; blue veins show through pale, translucent skin.

  She lifts her head, looks me in the eyes, and begins murmuring. I can barely hear her. I bend closer until we are nose to nose. When she stops, she looks expectantly at me, and though I haven’t detected the sense of a single word, I murmur back to her.

  “I know, Momma. I see what a bad time you had. Life is getting harder for you.”

  Like we once did sitting on the porch glider watching the moon grace Bessie Creek, we both talk at once. Though now we aren’t using words, just quiet murmuring sounds, like the slow-moving creek itself as it flows through the props of the mangroves.

  When I spot Bo and Dad crunching across the stiff Florida grass, toward the house, I say one last thing to my mother.

  “Whatever you decide is okay with me. I understand. I’ll help Daddy. When you’ve had enough, you can do what you need to do.” And now without worrying that I will confuse her, I can once again tell her what a wonderful mother she has been to me. I can pour out my love and gratitude.

  Like two African lovebirds, our noses touching, our four hands nesting in my mother’s lap, we make sounds to each other, quiet, private sounds. I put my arms around Mom and hold her close. Over her shoulder, I watc
h Bo and my father nearing us, Bessie Creek glinting sunlight behind them.

  All at once, I realize that I have learned the most about gaining independence and strength through dependent and weak people. Erik and my mother. In my heart, I thank them. I remember a long-ago talk with Bo when I wondered why the strong must be in service to the weak. I think now I know the answer. It is in gratitude for the lessons they teach.

  My father bursts into the house, his noisy energy bringing my mother’s quiet murmurs to a halt. “Telling secrets, you two? None of that.” My mother looks up at him. “Lizzie, you think it’s Halloween, blacking your teeth like that? Look at you.”

  Bo comes to stand beside me. He rests his hands on my shoulders. And I think to myself once more, It begins, it begins.

  Tina Welling lives and writes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Her essays have been published in magazines and several anthologies. Crybaby Ranch is her first novel.

  You can reach her at www.tinawelling.com

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  CONVERSATION GUIDE

  CRYBABY RANCH

  Tina Welling

  This Conversation Guide is intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.

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  CONVERSATION GUIDE

  A CONVERSATION

  WITH TINA WELLING

  Q. Was there a particular image or idea that triggered the writing of Crybaby Ranch?

  A. An image that supplied a lot of energy for writing this story occurred during an intense point in my mother’s fatal illness. I witnessed my parents holding each other’s hands and looking into each other’s eyes. My father said to my mother, “We are partners, aren’t we?” Though the scene lasted only a moment, I was seared with a profound awareness of what it means to commit to another person. They were nearing their fiftieth anniversary. I used this scene in the book to help Suzannah describe to Bo what kind of marriage she wanted.