by Tim Sandlin
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.
3
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 ea
ves. 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.”