by Tim Sandlin
“For my father’s honor, one of us has to die.”
“Can’t we forget the whole thing?”
He pointed the knife at me. “One of us has to die.”
***
My body was fast running out of gas. Even riding the bike a hundred miles had never worn me out this thoroughly. Bike fatigue was merely physical torture, and physical torture sometimes clears the mind. It sure helps you forget your other troubles. But the walk from Clark to my front door was a hike through the La Brea tar pits. Deathbed flu. The boy was beat.
How many people had I brought to tears today? How many threatened me with violence, compared to how many turned violent? And don’t forget Gilia Saunders. I didn’t even know the questions to ask on that one.
I dealt with the doorknob and thought, guess we’ll have to start locking soon, then I stumbled into the shelter of the family foyer and fell over a pumpkin. Landed on my hip on another pumpkin, which started a pumpkin avalanche. When the slide finally stopped, I lay on my back surrounded by mountains of pumpkins, oceans of pumpkins. The entry hallway was belly deep in orange.
I did not care. I did not give a hoot. I was not affected. Nothing and no one mattered except crawling up the staircase and into bed.
11
I dreamt of clitorides. Squadrons of clitorides marching in formation like mushrooms in Fantasia. High clitorides, flat clitorides, hard clitorides, squishy clitorides. Amber waves of clitorides.
My dreams used to center on the entire vertical ravine, from furry outgrowth to the hillock atop the twin cliffs—major and minor—leading into the black swamp from which all life arises but no man returns. Of late, my dreams had forsaken the chasm in general to focus on the pleasure button perched on high. Women try to keep pleasure caused by the pleasure button secret from men, because men are limited to the pressure cooker squirt, and the male gender would probably quit having sex if they found out women are having more fun than men are. Yet—the big yet—modern women demand that we know exactly where the button is and how it is operated.
The days when Henry Miller could write in Tropic of Cancer “A cunt came into the room,” “She was a cute cunt,” “Only a rich cunt can save me now” are long dead. And good riddance. Today, clitorides walk into rooms.
***
When I awoke, the weight of gravity had tripled overnight. A psychic anvil balanced on my forehead and my internal organs felt calcified. We’re talking symptoms of oncoming depression. Depression is paralyzed spirit. If they ever invent a pill that cures depression, I’ll take it. Even if the price is impotency, I’ll pop that pill in a heartbeat.
The only hope is to go through the motions. Shower, shave, brush the teeth—wonder how many years till they fall out. Maurey Pierce told me if you act normal long enough someday you’ll become normal. This was when I was fifteen and dressing like Scott Fitzgerald and wondering why girls wouldn’t go out with me. Maurey said if I brushed my teeth twice a day and read TV Guide cover to cover every issue pretty soon I would stop being strange and girls would begin to make eye contact.
Downstairs, I found Gus, Shannon, and the male Eugene sprawled around the kitchen table, drinking coffee over the local morning paper. To my complete disgust, Shannon and Eugene both wore bathrobes.
“Have you no shame!”
“C’mon, Dad. You and Mom were living together at thirteen.”
“That’s because your mother was pregnant.”
Eugene grinned. The chump sat there in my bathrobe—a blue terry-cloth number that safety-pinned together because a woman named Linda used the belt to tie me up and somehow it’d gotten lost.
The import of my last words made me nauseous. “You’re not?”
Shannon broke into laughter, joined by Eugene and Gus. They laughed at me for trying to be a traditional father.
“Of course not,” Shannon said.
Since no one jumped to pour my coffee, I poured it myself. One thing Gus can do is make good coffee. “That’s not something to say ‘of course’ about,” I said. “Pregnancy is an accident.”
Shannon held her cup out to me. I refilled her but ignored Eugene’s similar silent plea.
“After the olden days when you and Mom were active, the scientists invented something called birth control,” Shannon said. I hate tacky kids.
Eugene said, “Shannon has a diaphragm.”
“You went to a doctor and told him you were planning ahead to have sex?”
“Daddy, this is the eighties. Times have changed since you were young.”
“I’m still young.”
Gus did her nostril exhale blast that says it all. “I got a grandpa acts younger than you and he’s in a rest home.”
Eugene smirked into his empty cup. He had no call to come off young and vital; his hairline was already in full retreat. By the time Eugene made thirty he was going to pass for Friar Tuck. I may not have much, but at least I’ve kept my hair.
Gus pushed herself up from the table. “Eat your beans, you’ll feel better.”
“I am not in the mood for red beans.”
“Your father’s pouting again,” Gus said to Shannon.
“I am not pouting, I’m just tired of red beans for breakfast. Why can’t we have biscuits and ham like other rich families with black cooks?”
Gus said, “Racist cracker.”
“Did you meet your fathers?” Shannon asked.
“Why are there two hundred pumpkins in the foyer?”
“Three hundred fifty,” Eugene said. He was eating beans. He seemed perfectly happy to sit at my table in my bathrobe eating my beans. After sleeping in my daughter’s bed. Goldilocks incarnate.
“Did you meet your fathers or not?” Shannon asked.
“Yes, I met them.”
“All five?”
“One’s dead.”
“Which one?” Eugene asked.
“The black guy.”
“Figures,” Gus said.
“And?” Shannon was impatient. I didn’t know what to tell her. The fathers were good, bad, and ugly, like everyone else. They had families and jobs. None were in the CIA or professional baseball, and, so far as I could tell, none had made a career out of rape.
Shannon stared at me. “Did you figure out who’s the real father?”
“Yesterday was the worst day of my life, including the day Wanda left. Confronting the fathers was stupid. Idiotic. I did it because you two made me and now it’s over and buried and I demand to know why there’s three hundred fifty fucking pumpkins in the foyer!”
“Daddy. That’s no way to talk in front of guests.”
***
Another morning at Tex and Shirley’s. I hadn’t eaten a meal cooked by my cook in three days. The waitress with Judy on her name tag recognized me from the day before—asked if I wanted cheese blintzes again. I said, “Sure thing,” without thinking because I was still going over what I should have said during the conversation back home. Us writer types aren’t good at live conversation. It takes eight drafts for me to sound spontaneous.
What happened was the kids had gone philanthropic at a pumpkin stand on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
“The little ragamuffin behind the counter wasn’t even wearing shoes,” Eugene said. “We had to nurture her somehow.”
“Shannon hardly ever wore shoes when she was a little ragamuffin.”
“We witnessed classic poverty in America. The girl obviously had a vitamin deficiency, and I don’t doubt she’d been physically abused. The vast majority of women in her socio-economic class are physically abused, statistically speaking.”
So Shannon rented a U-Haul trailer and bought out the pumpkin stand.
“Your daughter has a heart of gold,” Eugene said.
Young men speak in clichés; old men live them. “Why not give the girl all your money and let her keep the pumpkins to sell to someone else?” I asked. “Lord knows we don’t need more than one pumpkin.”
“Categorical impoverishment disdains charity,�
� Eugene said. Shannon wasn’t speaking to me. She does that whenever I won’t cooperate.
“I’ve found people you think won’t accept charity generally will when you word it right.”
Eugene sent me a look like I’m simple and he’s not. “These pumpkin sellers are endemic of the old Appalachian value system which ascribes nobility to poverty, but only in the context of the self-contained family unit, much like John Boy and the Waltons. Charity is viewed as debasement.”
Gus snorted and spoke to Shannon. “Does he talk that way in bed?” I left before Shannon answered.
***
At first I thought the waitress looked like the woman who walked her cat on a leash, then I realized she was the woman who walked her cat on a leash.
When she brought my blintzes, I asked, “Why walk a tied-up cat?”
She looked at me suspiciously, which is nothing new. Waitresses often look at me suspiciously. “Have you been spying on me?”
“I saw your cat yesterday and wondered why you walk her on a leash.”
“You ever try walking a cat without a leash?”
“My cat Alice went outside on her own.”
The waitress put her hand in her uniform pocket, then took it out again. She touched her ear and blinked quickly. “I can’t risk that with Judy.”
I looked at her name tag. “You’re Judy.”
She continued to move her hands nervously. I could tell this was a touchy subject. “Mr. Angusen named Judy after me. Mr. Angusen was my husband, before he caught the emphysema and said he’d rather die than quit Kent cigarettes. He was so crazy about our kitten that he named her after me.”
“My friend Maurey named a horse after her father.”
“Judy is all that’s left. I can’t risk losing her too.”
Made sense to me. “I used to be emotionally dependent on a cat. You reach a point where something outside yourself has to hold you together because you can’t do it on your own anymore, and a pet is the only choice.”
The waitress had sad eyes I hadn’t noticed the day before when I was busy fingering Linda Ronstadt. “What happened to your cat?” she asked.
“Alice got old and died.”
“How did you handle losing her?”
“I got married.”
***
I would never have married Wanda if Alice had lived. Alice was my cat who stuck with me while a score of women didn’t. Alice didn’t care for my women. She made a habit of peeing on panties left on the bedroom floor. I’m convinced several of my one-night stands would have lasted several more nights if the women involved had awoken to dry underwear. Alice was eighteen when her kidneys started to fail, and, for seven months, I injected her twice a day with fifty cc’s of electrolyte fluid. At the end I hand fed her ice for a week as she died. I doubt if I’ll ever get so close to an animal or person again. Intimacy on that deep a level takes too much out of you. After I lost Alice, I wallowed in fuck-and-suck avoidance for a month until Wanda came along, and, in a gush of relief that someone might actually take me for the long run, six weeks after I met Wanda I married her.
Then, ten days less than a year later—game four of the ’83 World Series—Wanda scrammed. She calculated the timing to inflict the highest amount of pain possible; of that I am certain. No woman just happens to leave her husband during the World Series.
***
My first marriage—the one we don’t talk about at family gatherings—lasted eight weeks. I was twenty-five, Leigh was thirty-seven and had just been divorced by her husband of fifteen years, who dumped her for Tammy Faye Bakker’s publicist. He left Leigh with a shattered personality, which I helped her glue back together piece by piece until she was whole enough to leave me for an underwater welder.
She said hurting me “balanced the books.” I asked her why she married me in the first place and she said, “To prove to myself someone still wanted me.”
12
Lydia publishes feminist literature, Maurey runs the ranch, I write Young Adult sports fiction, but what keeps all our noses above water is golf carts, an irony not lost on anyone, except possibly Lydia. In some circles I’m known as the golf cart czar. Actually, only one circle, but the people in it pull a lot of weight at country clubs across America. The Callahan family used to be known as carbon paper czars. Caspar Callahan Carbon Paper once stood as a veritable giant in the world of record keeping. But then Caspar died and a couple months later I happened to be in the Wachovia Bank wrangling the red tape it takes to get yourself into a dead relative’s safe deposit box, when the Xerox van delivered a 2400 series copier to the back door.
You’ve never seen such ecstatic secretaries. No more hassles with lining up three sheets of paper. No more smudgy fingers.
I sold out lickety-split. Take that, Minnesota Mining. Absorb another competitor, I’ll just drive down to Atlanta to a baseball game. The San Francisco Giants were playing the Braves—Juan Marichal against Phil Niekro. Willie McCovey led off the eighth by drilling a Niekro screwball through Chief Nokahoma’s tipi—a stand-up triple. Lum Harris chewed and spit and waved in a left-handed reliever.
That’s when the family fortune zipped into the modern era. A big healthy girl in a Braves cap and hot pants rolled through the bullpen in a motorized baseball on wheels, picked up Hoyt Wilhelm, and whisked him, silently, electrically, to the mound. I knew right then, in mid-Cracker Jack bite, that I had to own a motorized baseball.
So, I sank the carbon paper profits into golf carts.
To be honest, which God knows is what I’m striving for here, I didn’t immediately recognize the motorized baseball as a plastic shell mounted on a golf cart. I hated golf then—although not as much as I hate golf now—and I simply didn’t think in terms of market.
Golf isn’t really a sport. It’s fancy pants networking; rich white guys in spiffy outfits, cruising the lawn in one of my carts, comparing financial tidbits and sexual exploitation fantasies. Golf is for doctors and bankers and all those career guys who, being a writer, I consider myself superior to.
We owned one of each Callahan Magic Cart Company model. The garage was so packed that sometimes I had to park my 240Z in the driveway, back when I had a 240Z. Shannon organized cart polo matches over at the junior high football field. Cart polo is an outgrowth of cart croquet. Both games use beach balls, golf carts, and croquet mallets. Cart polo is a lot of fun—you can drink and play simultaneously—and I wish it would catch on with the college kids so I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about making a fortune off a non-sport I find disgusting, boring, and morally offensive.
***
“You didn’t have to come in,” Shirley said. “Everything’s flowing smooth as peaches, so we don’t have any use for you.”
“I thought it was time I stop moping around the house and get back to work.”
“Moping around the house is what you did best before you married the Queen, and practically all you did while she ruled the roost. I fail to fathom what this ‘get back’ to work refers to.”
Shirley is my bookkeeper and one of the three women who each thinks she runs the Callahan empire. I have Gaylene in production and Ambrosia in sales. All three have copped a the-owner-is-harebrained attitude toward me, forgetting I’m the one who created this nifty system of delegated authority. I hired them all years ago at salaries considerably higher than what’s paid men in similar jobs. Back then, Carolina women didn’t even have similar jobs. Shirley, Gaylene, and Ambrosia came from positions where they mostly fetched refreshments, ran personal errands, and covered the boss’s butt when he screwed up—with raises directly contingent on attitude.
Ambrosia, who has the thickest accent in the South, explained to me what attitude means in upper-level management lingo. “A good attitude is when you’ll suck off the boss and a bad attitude is when you won’t. I had a bad attitude.”
My gang was so thrilled to be chosen for real jobs that they worked twice as hard as men would have and netted me a couple million a year, aft
er taxes. If that makes me a harebrain, the world is full of well-to-do rabbits.
“Pretend I’m your employer, Shirley. Give me tidbits of accounts receivable.”
“Accounts receivable is none of your concern.”
“I’ve already begged my daughter to behave even vaguely like a daughter today. Don’t make me degrade myself to you too.”
Shirley gave me one of those looks I imagine ept sergeants give inept generals. She spoke quickly. “Ambrosia got drunk with some CEO from North Dakota last night and sold his country club a hundred ten Shilohs.” Naming our cart models after Civil War battles gives the line a thematic unity.
“How about Gaylene?”
“Gaylene paid the union steward a kickback. We’re covered through the winter. Anything else you need to know to make believe you’re a vital cog in this here well-oiled machine?”
Shirley has a grandson Shannon’s age. Can you believe a woman that old would treat me with such disrespect? “That’ll be enough.”
She turned back to her office, which is larger than mine. “The Coke machine is out of Fresca again. You want to do something worthwhile, call Dixie Distributing and make some threats.”
“Can you get me their number?”
“You’ve got eyes and fingers. Look it up yourself.”
***
I sat at my desk with my hands folded in my lap, waiting for something to happen to change my dull ache of a life. The desk was completely clean except for a Smith-Corona typewriter in the dead center and a small, framed photograph, facedown, in the left-hand upper corner. The facedown face on my laminated desk belonged to Wanda the wife. I’d put her facedown when I discovered I couldn’t write Young Adult sports fiction with her staring at me in disappointment because I wasn’t Saul Bellow.
I’d never promised to be Saul Bellow, never even hinted that I might write something more literary than tales of right and wrong set in the metaphorical world of the baseball diamond. Sports is today’s battleground between good and evil. The goals of sports are honest and understandable—if you play by the rules using your mind and body to the best of your abilities, you win. Athletes with character flaws lose.