by Tim Sandlin
“Have you been introduced?”
“We’re all buddies on this bus,” Eugene said. It rankled me some to think a stranger would consider Eugene part of my family. He sat in Caspar’s Lincoln rocker, which I’d never had the gall to sit in, slicing the tops off a pile of pumpkins on the coffee table. The kids had quite the efficient operation. Eugene circumcised and eviscerated, so to speak, and the girls created pumpkin personalities. The vegetable art was easy to separate. Gilia was into cubism—triangle eyes, rectangle mouths with squared-off teeth—while Shannon was sloppier. Her guys had noses all over heck and the eyes of a Picasso. Everybody was fast. Maybe a hundred heads crowded around the legs of Me Maw’s baby grand, with another fifty topped and scooped, waiting for surgery. A gross four-foot mound of slime and seeds rose from newspapers spread across my oak floor.
“The detective says you’re an immoral scumbag,” Shannon said.
I stabbed my pumpkin in its future eye hole. Slicing down, I tried to remember if Gilia mentioned the detective yesterday, or that information came from Katrina only.
“What detective?”
Gilia was watching me. “The one who showed up at Skip’s house last night and again this morning. They made me read his report because I rode around with you and everyone is afraid I’ll pick the wrong side. Ryan says he’ll box my ears if I ever speak to you again.”
Shannon was outraged. “Box your ears? Where did this guy find his word choice?”
“Nineteen fifty-two. When they showed me how terrible you are, I had to come and see myself.”
I stabbed a nose. “I don’t think I’m terrible.”
“Repeat that affirmation several times daily and soon your superego will recover from its recent humiliation,” Eugene said. He flipped a wad of orange snot on the goop pile.
“Did you really eat LSD in college?” Gilia asked.
“Who told Skip?”
“And you were arrested for having sex on a Ferris wheel.”
“Alicia couldn’t get off in bed. I had to get her off.”
Shannon pointed her knife at me with much better form than Clark had shown the night before. “Daddy, why was it okay for you to have sex and do drugs but not okay for me?”
“Double standard,” Eugene said.
“It is not a double standard. In those days we believed in peace and love. Kids now do sex and drugs for all the wrong reasons.”
“He knocked up a thirteen-year-old girl,” Gilia said.
Shannon frowned. “She was my mother.”
“Did Skip tell you I was thirteen too? And Maurey seduced me. I wasn’t given a choice.”
“It doesn’t say anything about your age in the ad,” Gilia said. “Just that you impregnated a thirteen-year-old.”
A bad feeling crept into my stomach. “Ad?”
“Skip’s buying a full-page ad in the Greensboro Record so he can expose your sleazy past.”
“The newspaper won’t print it.”
“I told him that, but Skip says they will or he’ll pull the Dixieland Sporting Goods account.”
“They still won’t. Except for politicians, ads like that are illegal.”
“Then he’ll have flyers printed.”
Advertising seemed like overkill. I’d never done anything that even vaguely compared to the nastiness of rape, and you didn’t see me printing up handbills on Skip and the gang.
“What traitorous hell bitch gave him this dirt?”
“Your wife.”
Gus brought in a tray with a bowl of toasted pumpkin seeds and brandy snifters all around. Seemed a bit early in the day to be drinking with my underage daughter, but I didn’t want Gilia thinking I was structured, so I kept my mouth shut and flew with the flow, or whatever they call good sports these days. We held our snifters aloft while Shannon recited the poem about teeth and gums, look out stomach here she comes. Gus and I downed moderate sips, but the three young people chugged the load. When Gus saw this, she glanced at me and tossed the rest of her brandy down her throat. I followed suit. Tasted like NyQuil.
Hands on hips, Gus studied my artwork. “What you making there? Looks like a sicko paper doll.”
I turned the pumpkin face out. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Van Gogh’s self-portrait,” Gilia said. “The later one.”
“Right.”
Shannon hummed a riff from the “Twilight Zone” theme, then said, “Warped minds think alike.”
Eugene grinned as if he knew all the answers. “Sympatico.” This from a man with drippy arms the color of a hepatitis victim.
I was secretly pleased and alarmed at the same time. While I’d always wanted to meet a woman who thinks like me, this parallel brains jive might be more genetic overlap than compatibility. I’d reached the point where I really hoped Gilia wasn’t my sister. Or cousin.
“Anyone with class can recognize van Gogh,” I said. I decided a giant ear hole would be the magic clue.
Gus snorted. “I got class and I thought it was an electrocuted cat.”
Gilia touched my sculpture, the other side away from where I was cutting. “I like it. No one who sees van Gogh in a squash could be an immoral scumbag.” She and I made meaningful eye contact across the pumpkin.
Shannon jumped in to wreck the mood. “My daddy can. Don’t let his sensitivity line fool you, I’ll bet cash he’s been woofing it up on a married woman all morning.”
The X-Acto knife slipped through pumpkin meat and stabbed me in the palm. I dropped the knife and sucked my hand a moment to compose myself. They were all looking at me.
“I was only kidding,” Shannon said.
I put on my innocent face. “Some people’s kids are too precocious for their own good.”
She blushed a Cabernet color. Maybe she was chastised, but, more likely, she realized she’d accidentally nailed me. Shannon sees through my innocent face the way I see through Lydia’s pretending to lie whenever she tells the truth. Contrary to what we’ve been told, children can detect deceit in parents much easier than parents can detect deceit in children.
***
To cover the awkwardness of the moment, or possibly out of disgust at me, Shannon dipped her right hand into the pumpkin pulp mound, came out with a hefty wad of slime, leaned across Gilia’s latest jack-o’-lantern, and pasted me right between the eyes. Splat! Juice and stringy, mucus-like stuff trickled down my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. I sealed my left nostril by covering it with a finger and sneezed, rocketing a seed out of my right nostril through van Gogh’s ear hole.
Shannon went back to work on a pumpkin. Gilia stared at me, and Eugene stared at Shannon. Gus helped herself to toasted seeds. Dignity seemed important. Maintaining a rigid decorum, I got to my feet and walked behind the girls toward the bathroom. As I passed Shannon, I leaned over and scooped up a handful of orange slime and dumped it down the back of her shirt—my shirt, actually, as she’d recently taken to stealing my dress Van Heusens.
Shannon’s spine snapped upright, but she made no noise. Her hand flipped up as if she were throwing salt over her shoulder, only instead of salt, my face caught pulp. The pumpkin slime in my mouth gave me another metaphor for the taste and consistency of a turned-on woman, which I needed. There’s a limit to how often you can compare something to raw oysters.
I cupped my hands together for a double load of what felt like alfalfa-fed cow poop. Lifting my hands high, I brought the whole load down on her head. Take that, trollop.
Shannon turned to face me. The only sound was the gentle crunch of Gus chewing seeds. I glanced over at Gilia. She hadn’t decided if this was family horseplay or an all-out fight. I hadn’t either. Shannon was just like her mother in that I couldn’t tell squat about what she was thinking until she decided to tell me. At the moment, for instance, as she pulled my belt toward her and dumped a pint of goo down my boxers, was she angry as hell or amused to no end? My next move should have been dictated by attitude, but not knowing attitude, I answered her shorts shot with cleavage filler.
Shannon’s mouth and eyes went rigid. She looked so much like Maurey I wanted to apologize. I wanted to hand her a handkerchief and say, “Whoops, let’s forget the ugly incident. We’ll pretend it was a recurring dream.”
Fat chance.
She started to circle, which made me nervous. I’d expected more goop and was prepared to take my medicine, but this empty-handed circling threw me off. We rotated like the Earth keeping track of a pissed-off moon. What was the moon up to? She had a glop of pumpkin on her forehead and a seed stuck in her right eyebrow.
Then Shannon stopped. “It’s not nice to slime your daughter,” she said.
“You slimed me first.”
She shook her head. “You’ll never learn, will you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her eyes were bulletproof glass—space age plastic. Ten thousand howling Zulus firing spears at helpless Redcoats. Unable to meet such fierceness head on, I looked away, first at Eugene, whose face revealed an intellectual interest in father-daughter dynamics, then at Gus, who was chewing and watching something behind and below me.
Maybe I heard her, or maybe I simply felt Gilia’s presence. Whatever the cause, I glanced between my legs just as Shannon charged.
Splat! The classic Three Stooges kneel-behind-the-knees-and-push maneuver. What the Bowery Boys called a number seven. I landed neck deep in slop.
I read in one of Wanda’s Cosmo magazines that men often express a desire to crawl into women they copulate with. Cosmo took this as a return-to-the-womb neediness. I, personally, have never had any desire to return to Lydia’s womb. The fact I was once that close to my mother is appalling, and I have no wish to be inside a woman again. However, for those men who fantasize about crawling up the crotch of an excited woman, I suggest they first try bathing in pumpkin pulp. A lesson might be learned.
Shannon and Gilia thought my predicament was a hoot. Cause for belly laughs all around. Eugene had fallen on the floor, struck down by hilarity. Even Gus chuckled.
I sat up, grabbed Gilia by the arm, and yanked her into the pile—where her intense laughter turned into a shriek. Shannon put out a Blackfeet war cry—taught to her by Maurey, who learned it from Hank Elkrunner—and dived on both of us.
15
Shannon apologized to me the next morning, an event worthy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
“I’m sorry I said you were woofing it up on a married woman yesterday,” Shannon said. “You’re such an easy target, sometimes I forget you have feelings.”
I hung my head and stirred my red beans. “You cut me to the quick.”
“I realized that afterwards. You got so pale.”
Was she being ironic? Lydia and Maurey taught me long ago never to take a woman’s word at face value. I decided the proper course was silent yet wounded. Lies of omission are easier to cover than the out-loud kind.
Shannon brought her coffee and sat down opposite me. “Gilia is amazingly nice—I can’t remember the last time a nice woman liked you—but you know how it is when a daughter’s father gets a new girlfriend. There’s a moment of jealousy.”
“Gilia isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Daddy, don’t be a fool. Of course she’s your new girlfriend. I think she’ll make a wonderful mom.”
As a responsible parent, my job was to disagree. “She’s only five years older than you are.”
“If the shoe fits, don’t ask how old it is.”
“Who told you that?”
“You did, the night you went off with Jimmy Otake’s grandmother.”
Why don’t children ever forget? Shannon had been seven when I went off with Jimmy Otake’s grandmother.
“But Gilia’s a blonde,” I said. “I don’t care much for blondes.”
Shannon’s laugh was effervescent. “Daddy, you want any woman who wants you. This time you lucked out and found a good one, so don’t blow it. Here, she left me her phone number. It’s a personal line into her room, so you don’t have to deal with the family.”
I looked at the slip of paper in my hand. Gilia was a high-quality woman, which was the last thing I needed coming off the hard rebound from Wanda. Gilia was young, good-looking, and energetic—all that potential and long legs too—and she would break my heart. No, now was not the time to mingle with lovable women.
“I’m not going to call her,” I said.
“Give me one semi-rational reason why not.”
“To start with, Gilia might be my sister.”
“Gilia told me her father is left-handed. You’re right-handed, therefore her father isn’t your father.”
“Gilia’s right-handed.”
“Perfect. He’s not her father either.”
***
Gus stood in the parlor with her arms crossed over her chest. Orange slop hung from the piano, the chairs, the table, the William and Mary desk and bookcase, a Matisse print, and a Schenk original. I tried to remember the difference between stalagmites and stalactites.
“It’s drying hard,” Gus said.
“I don’t suppose you’d—”
“In a pig’s eye. I’d quit and go work for Jesse Helms before I’d clean this room.”
I’d suspected as much. Spontaneous messiness always brings backlash.
“Call Manpower and have them send over a team of winos. Tell them I’ll pay double.”
“You’ll pay triple.”
***
Gilia answered on the seventh ring. “What took you so long?” she said. “I thought you’d never call.”
“I planned to never call, but I thought I should explain why I can’t call you.”
“Are you going to Tex and Shirley’s for breakfast? Skip’s detective says that’s what you usually do about now.”
“Two days in a row. I hate it when you do something two days in a row and people start calling it a rut. That detective is damn presumptuous.”
“He’s only been on the job a day and a half.”
“I refuse to be predictable.”
“I only asked because I’m thinking I might join you there.”
“At Tex and Shirley’s?”
“We could talk.”
“What about?”
“Sam, didn’t you ever meet someone for breakfast? You sit and drink coffee and shoot the shit.”
“I’m real bad at shooting shit.”
“I’ll teach you, Sam. Hanging out is one of my talents.”
Blues music came from Gilia’s end of the line. She must have been listening to it when I called, but if so, why take seven rings to answer?
“Won’t the detective tell Skip, who’ll tell Cameron, and Ryan will box your ears?”
“I’m twenty-four years old, they can’t control me with threats.”
“They can me.”
Gilia’s laugh was clear water bubbling down the side of a mountain.
***
So, Gilia and I started meeting each morning at Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. It’d been so long since I’d talked to anybody about anything, that, at first, I felt exposed. I kept expecting her to get bored, like the two mental therapists I’d been dragged to over the years did. Lydia seduced the first one, and the second one, in college, told me to grow up.
“The prom’s over,” he said. “Stop your whining.”
But Gilia never acted bored or impatient. She listened while I rambled on about life with an airhead mother, and metaphors in baseball, and the transcendence of Young Adult sports fiction. The trick to seducing women is to shut up and listen to them—no one’s probably done that before and they’ll generally sleep with you out of gratitude—but with Gilia, I didn’t want to seduce her so much as get to know her real well. And that meant allowing her to know me.
This is revolutionary stuff here.
She mostly talked about prep school and college and the strange men and women who live in Washington, D.C. I’d been raised rich, at least until Caspar cut us off there for a few years, but I’d missed the
prepster-debutante-networking thing. I guess Lydia wanted me to grow up normal.
Gilia was very passionate about art history. She had real opinions on movements and periods and all that stuff that most people only fake having opinions about. Her favorite American painter was an Impressionist named Lilla Cabot Perry. Once Gilia got started on Lilla Cabot Perry, she would go all morning if I didn’t jump in when my turn came to talk.
Gilia won Judy over that first Monday.
“His wife treated him poorly,” Judy said as she poured my coffee.
“She must have had bad tastes,” Gilia said.
“It was because his kitty passed on and he was vulnerable.”
Both women looked at me with obvious sympathy. I ate it up.
“When did your kitty die?” Gilia asked.
“Two years ago, the last weekend of March.”
“You must have really loved her.”
“My cat’s name is Judy,” Judy said. “We’re very close.” Gilia didn’t ask why a waitress named Judy had a cat named Judy. Instead, she went into what kind, how old, what do you feed her, don’t you just love it when she lies on your neck and purrs.
“You must have a cat yourself,” Judy said to Gilia.
“I have a Siamese named Beaux, but he thinks he has me.”
In no time flat Judy was bringing extra strawberries for the strawberry pancakes and not charging for coffee. “This one won’t get jealous of a passed-on cat and leave you,” Judy said.
“She’ll find another excuse,” I said, and they laughed as if I were kidding.
When it came time to go, Gilia waved to a man who sat a couple tables over, reading a Sporting News.
“Mike, there’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Gilia said. Mike was a little guy with muscles and a narrow mustache.
“Mike Newberry, meet Sam Callahan. Mike’s the detective who’s been researching your life.”
He held out his hand, but I hesitated a moment, unsure if it’s proper form to shake with the man who’s tailing you. Were we supposed to be adversaries or just two people trying to get by? In the end, I decided it didn’t matter and shook his hand anyway.
He pretended not to notice my hesitation. “I’ve heard so much about you, I feel like we’ve already met,” Mike said.