by Tim Sandlin
“You must think I’m made of money.”
Another sore point—my money. “You’re made of horseshit, Sam. God knows everyone here at the TM Ranch appreciates our allowance; we’re just tired of doing backflips to yank it out of you.”
I didn’t say anything. The first days after your marriage dies, people should cut a little slack. The women in my life don’t know the meaning of slack.
“I’m sorry,” Maurey said.
“I’m sorry too.” I listened to Maurey breathe, but she didn’t say anything more. “How many lost souls am I supporting this week?” I asked.
“Three, counting your mother. I’ve got a recovering junkie out haying with Hank, and an unwed mother who’s supposed to be teaching Auburn French, but so far all she’s done is cry. And Petey called, he’s coming in Wednesday. God knows why.”
“I thought Petey hated all things rural.” Petey is Maurey’s brother. He’s never much liked me and vice versa, although we keep it civil. I never called him a derogatory name, either to his face or back, but he once said I was a screaming heterosexual.
“All I know’s what the letter said—meet him at the airport Wednesday. I suppose you’ll be the next to drag your ass home. Pud wants to change our name to Lick Your Wounds Ranch.”
“I better stay put for now. Wanda might come back and she’d worry if I was gone.”
Maurey made a snort sound. “She’s a bitch, Sam. The woman doesn’t deserve to suck the mud off your sneakers.”
***
Back to the bike. Now I have two traumas to flee—my botched marriage and my daughter’s lost virginity.
To say that my life began with Shannon’s birth is not the overblown remark you might think. I was thirteen when Shannon was born, three weeks short of fourteen. How much that matters can happen to a person before his fourteenth birthday? Mostly I took care of my mother, Lydia, which is another thing I discovered when I reached what passes for adulthood. Parents are supposed to take care of children, not the other way around. Lydia told me it was normal for a child to cook meals and wash the clothes. How was I supposed to know different? She had me balancing her checkbook when I was ten years old—the ditz never wrote down dates and check numbers—and these days she complains continuously because I won’t let her handle money. I mean, good grief, already.
Lydia now runs the only feminist press in Wyoming. She’s stopped drinking and stopped smoking, and she jogs the county roads wearing a sweatshirt, tights, ninety-dollar sneakers, and a headband that, if you circle it from ear to ear, reads Men can be replaced with a banana.
Oothoon Press publishes books such as Mother Lied and The Castration Solution. Lydia’s authors call me, the one who pays their bills, a pig and a villain simply because I have a penis and most of the pigs and villains down through history have had penises. Hell, I don’t like the male sex any more than Lydia’s authors, only I make an exception of myself.
When Maurey gave me the Russell print of the Indians killing the buffalo, she said it reminded her of me. I’d recently ridden several days and several hundred miles directly into the scene, and I still didn’t get the connection. One Indian is shooting the buffalo with a rifle, and one Indian is shooting him with a bow and arrow, while a third waves a spear in the air and shouts Indian stuff. Meanwhile, the buffalo is goring the hell out of a fourth Indian, who is either dead or dying, and stomping the hell out of the fourth Indian’s white horse. The painting is dramatic, what with two animals and a human dying and three humans and an animal killing, and everyone caught up in your basic here and now.
After Maurey said Wanda was unworthy to suck the mud off my sneakers, I rode eighty miles, staring at her painting. I’ve never been one to get caught up in the here and now, myself. I can’t remember a single scene I’ve been in where one part of me wasn’t standing off to the side, figuring how to word it when I told the story to a woman, and conceptualizing her reaction, then my reaction to her reaction and so on until we wound up in bed or married or whatever. Call it the curse of the romantic writer—even the romantic writer of Young Adult sports novels. So far I have the temperament of Scott Fitzgerald and the following of Dizzy Dean. Reach out for an understanding of that one.
Did Maurey think of me as the Indians killing the buffalo? Or the buffalo itself? Maybe she was saying I’m the last of a dying breed, valiantly raging in a futile battle before ultimate death. That didn’t really sound like my Maurey. Or maybe I’m the dead or dying Indian who got himself reamed by his prey.
She’d more likely think of me as an Indian than a buffalo. I’m not bulky or hairy enough to compare to the buffalo. She probably thought of me as an Indian—wild and free and prone to running around without a shirt. Lydia’s boyfriend is an Indian. Hank Elkrunner does most of the actual labor at Maurey’s ranch. I don’t know how Hank puts up with my mother’s never-ending narcissism. Lydia passionately cares about the condition of her nails and the worldwide fight for feminist awareness, only she doesn’t put much stock on details in between, like family and friends.
Mostly Hank looks inscrutable and stays out at the ranch until he’s summoned to take care of her banana needs. Hank Elkrunner is the only male person I’ve ever been able to stomach for the long run. Shannon says my anti-male bias is the character flaw that dooms every aspect of my life, such as women. I don’t agree with her, but many hours of cranking an Exercycle while fleeing demons is a good time to question basic assumptions.
The neat thing about physically pushing yourself above and beyond endurance is that after exhaustion comes second wind, then after second wind you slide into bizarre, disconnected thought processes. Bizarre, disconnected thought processes are followed by third and fourth winds during which the brain goes to lands even drugs can’t take it, and finally you start to hallucinate your ass off.
I heard hoofbeats; the buffalo snorted and blew steam and red foam from his nostrils; the horse screamed as its back was broken. The wall framing the painting thrummed with the low breathing of a sleeping beast. Hallucinations can be cool, or they can scare the living bejesus out of a person.
Women’s faces swooped at me—Lydia, Maurey, Shannon, Gus. Then bodies—beautiful bodies with elbows, shoulder blades, the backs of knees, necks, feet, and fingers—all the parts that I love. Like bats, crotches began swooping out of the buffalo’s head, straight at my own. Here came the wispy blond tufts of Leigh, the stiff-as-a-hairbrush bush of Janey, Wanda’s crotch shaved smooth like a volleyball. Darlene, Karlene, and Charlene. Sweet Maria. Linda the raw oyster.
Before Wanda, I was rarely able to hold a woman longer than two menstrual periods. Rejection came soon after copulation, but there for a while copulation came with rapid-fire regularity. Call it the conquest-and-loss syndrome. It was nothing I did or deserved. Any non-jerk who is young, fairly well off, and single—and has a beautiful daughter—can find short-term romance. Plus Maurey taught me how to get the girls off every time. That helps.
I leaned forward with my eyes closed, sweat dribbling off my chin onto the handlebars, concentrating on the parade of crotches. I could taste each woman’s juice on my tongue and the back of my mouth. A sound came like water on concrete, and I opened my eyes. The Indians had been replaced by five men who stood in a circle with their penises out, aimed at the buffalo, who had turned into a woman I couldn’t recognize. She lay on the floor with her dress torn and her back bare and bleeding while the men urinated on her.
3
“I found every last one of them,” Shannon said as she blew into the kitchen the next morning. She was wearing white shorts and a teenage wench top that reminded me of Paw Paw Callahan’s undershirts. A boy followed several paces behind, assuming the demeanor of a well-trained spaniel.
“This is Eugene,” Shannon said. “Eugene, my dad.”
The boy stepped around Shannon to shake my hand. I stayed seated in front of the red beans and biscuits Gus insists I eat every morning of my put-upon life.
“Pleased to meet yo
u, sir,” Eugene said. His hand was the texture of deep-fried tofu. In my day, we didn’t go around touching the fathers of girls we boffed.
I looked past him. “Where were you last night, little lady?”
Shannon ignored my question as she poured herself and Eugene mugs of coffee. Eugene had that classic psych major look—receding hairline, dribbly chin, canvas shoes. Shannon put Sweet’n Low in his coffee without asking. She wrinkled her nose flirtatiously at him, then turned to me and said, “It only took four hours at the library. You could have done it years ago.”
“Forms must be maintained,” I said. “If you’re going to stay out all night I demand the courtesy of being lied to.”
Shannon reached in her day pack and pulled out a nightgown. I scowled at Eugene, who hung his head and grinned. If he said “Aw, shucks,” I meant to plaster the kid—red beans right up the snout. Beneath the nightgown, Shannon found what she was looking for—a letter-size envelope and a larger manila envelope.
She came over and dropped them on the table next to my Greensboro News. “Names and addresses of all your fathers.”
“What?”
“Greensboro only had three high schools in 1949. All we had to do was find the yearbooks.”
“Your black father took the longest,” Eugene said.
I lifted the letter envelope and four photographs fell out. “Where did you get these?”
Shannon opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “Don’t be dramatic, Daddy. Where do you think I got them? You were moping around like a wounded bear over Wanda the witch, so Eugene and I decided you needed something to do. And anyway, I deserve to know who my grandfather is.”
I stared at her with all the anger I could pull off, but since her head was in the refrigerator, my anger was neatly deflected. “You and Eugene decided I need something to do?”
Eugene smiled and nodded his head. “I said you should transfer your obsession to a suitable substitute other than your abject failure as a husband, and Shannon told me about the football players who group raped your mother and made her pregnant. That must have been a tremendous burden on your ego during the formative years—to know your very being is based on humiliation.”
“So I opened the safe and borrowed the pictures,” Shannon said. “Now, it’s your turn.”
I stared at the four photos. Five football players. Numbers 72, 56, 81, 11, and 20. Seventy-two and fifty-six were in the same picture. Big boys with burr haircuts and square heads. Eighty-one was thin and wore glasses. Eleven had the confident smirk of a high school quarterback. Twenty was black. He was noticeably shorter than the others and the only one grinning at the camera.
“What do you expect me to do?” I asked.
Shannon brought out the remains of a strawberry pie. “Those men violated Lydia. As her son it’s your duty to wreak vengeance. Destroy their wives, ravish their daughters, shame their sons, drag them publicly in front of the media and show the world what scumbags they are.”
Eugene smiled and nodded again.
“That was thirty-three years ago, Shannon. They were just boys then.”
Shannon focused on me with the fierceness of her mother. “They raped Lydia, for Godsake. They stood in a circle and pissed on her torn body. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”
“I can’t?”
***
Shannon, with Eugene in her wake, left for wherever women in the prime of their youth go in the morning. By eleven she had a Saturday lab class at UNC-G, where she was majoring in anthropology. I have no idea why she chose anthropology; maybe nobody knows their kids.
I stared at the manila envelope a while, then walked to my room to fetch the Grape-Nuts I kept hidden for times when Gus fixed breakfast and disappeared into her rich personal life that I know nothing about. She’s been with us ten years, and she still won’t tell me if she’s married or has children of her own or anything. Shannon probably knows.
Back in the kitchen, I poured two-percent milk over the Grape-Nuts and ate without looking in the bowl. Two-percent milk is another of those decisions the women had made for me. When you don’t have money, you think people who do have money can do anything they like. Don’t believe it.
Finally I stood and washed the cereal bowl and spoon, but not the beans plate or pan—the subterfuges we have to scheme through in our own home—and walked back to the table. The envelope held one sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad.
William Gaines
147 N. Glenwood
Skip Prescott
14 Corner Creek Drive
Cameron Saunders
16 Corner Creek Drive
Babe Carnisek
1212 W. 23rd
Jake Williams
2182 Bronson
The father thing has caused me a lot of discomfort late at night when thoughts range out of control. As a kid, I used to make up scenes where my real father was a famous baseball player or a CIA spy or something—anything, so long as he had an excuse to deny me up until the point of my daydream.
“I was being chased by the Mafia, son, and if anyone found out I had a boy, you would have been in the gravest danger.”
“I understand, Dad.”
In school when I should have been studying geography, I drew pictures of Dad. Mostly he looked like Moose Skowron who played first base for the New York Yankees. Sometimes he looked like John Kennedy.
But then Lydia spilled the beans about the group rape thing, and I had to face the fact that I am a child of violence. When I first started writing stories, I wrote the scene over and over.
“Try this on for size, you slimy slut,” the quarterback growled as he shoved his throbbing missile into Mom’s pubic mound.
“Smack her again,” laughed the tackle. “Make her beg.”
“Let’s hold her nose and pour more vodka down her throat,” the black guy said as he unleashed a gush of sperm into Mom’s hair.
I wrote a thirty-page version of the evening that ended with Lydia near death, crawling through vomit and come into the bathroom where she passed out with her fingers reaching for the spermicidal jelly.
Maurey says the truth about my roots is why I hate men.
“I don’t hate men. I just don’t trust the dirtbags.”
“Face it, Sam, you’re a male-aphobe.”
“If I hate men, then I hate myself.”
“That’s the point, dildo.”
My own mother claims I’m a latent homosexual. “All men who can’t stand men are denying their sexuality,” she said. “The thought that you’re queer makes you sick, so you deny it by overreacting. Why don’t you behave like Petey Pierce and let the door swing whichever way it swings.”
“I’m not gay, Lydia. If I was, I’d say so.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
My personal theory is I’m a Lesbian trapped in the body of a man.
Let’s analyze this deal: I am alive because of a monstrous crime. I enjoy being alive. I wouldn’t want it any other way. Which means I must be pleased these high school prick football players got Lydia drunk and forced their penises into her fourteen-year-old body. I must be pleased they stood in a circle and peed on her bloody, torn crotch.
Following this logic, whenever I think of the rape, which is all the time, I can’t stand myself for being pleased it happened and I’m alive. I can’t stand men for the physical power they possess over little girls. Therefore, I avoid contact with the male sex and I cannot resist giving oral orgasms to women, generally low-class women, although my standards vary with availability.
***
I popped open a Dr Pepper and wandered the house without energy, room to room, looking at the corners where the walls and floor came together. My grandfather, Caspar Callahan, had been semi-old New York money, and when he met and wed Lucille Weathers, semi-new Durham money, he founded the Caspar Callahan Carbon Paper Company and built the rich Yankees’ dream of an in-town plantation home. Not a scrap of carpeting in the house. Painting from the Sir
Walter Scott school of chivalry. Natural-wood chiffoniers and hutches and a Lincoln rocker I wasn’t allowed to sit in that must have been as old as Lincoln himself. The library was full of bound books I hadn’t read and a very large globe of the world as it appeared in 1948. The den was filled with paperback books I had read and a stereo system that could vibrate the columns out front.
The only major change I’d made downstairs in the fifteen years since Caspar’s death was to convert the salon into a home gym, with Nautilus equipment, a climbing wall, and a Sears Exercycle 6000 that faced the Charlie Russell painting of Indians killing a buffalo killing an Indian.
It’s odd owning a house, especially a big son-of-a-bitching house like mine. You tend to think in terms of my stuff. Those Chinese paper trees on the wall are mine. The glass-fronted gun case without guns in it is mine. After a while you think you deserve this stuff.
From day one Caspar viewed my mother as a pretty little lamebrain—the traditional Southern attitude toward rich girls. Lydia balked at the genteel lamebrain mold, opting for the rebellious lamebrain, which meant fighting Caspar night and day and entering numerous self-destructive scenarios simply to prove he couldn’t stop her from self-destructive scenarios. So, when the strokes finally nailed Caspar, he left me the house, the money, and the carbon paper company—which I almost instantly turned into the Callahan Magic Golf Cart Company. Caspar also left me the game of trying to control Lydia by controlling her cash flow. Pissed Lydia off to no end.
Upstairs are eight bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms. I opened and closed the doors of each one, just to see if someone I didn’t know was living with me. It could happen. Shannon has a way of bringing home lost pets and people. Takes after her mom, although Shannon specializes in out-of-work blues musicians, where Maurey mostly takes in drunks.
The last door on the left side of the north hallway was Wanda’s private sanctuary, where I’d been forbidden to set foot the last year. Maybe that room was the one I’d intended to explore all along, and the others were just circling the subject. When she first moved in, Wanda insisted on a space. Her word. She’d seen the cover of Virginia Woolf’s book in the den and decided a room of her own was the strong woman’s due. Wanda had gone out and charged various decorative items, including a wet bar, a Smith-Corona typewriter, a two-drawer file cabinet, and a Stanley padlock, and hauled everything into the room I used as a fort when I was growing up.