by Joan Opyr
Sylvie sat next to me on the sofa with her eyes closed. I could see that she was clenching her jaw. Otherwise, she gave nothing away. Kate sat next to my mother. She’d taken her shoes off and propped her feet up on an ottoman.
“That son of a bitch,” my mother spat out. “And he says it’s all Kate’s fault for not handing over half the inheritance?”
Kate sighed and shook her head. “Agnes didn’t want him getting his hands on a lump sum. He’s wanted to be rich all his life, but he’s a speculator. He takes wild risks, and it all blows up in his face.”
“Everything he touches turns from sugar to shit,” Emma agreed. “Jesus, what a nerve.”
“Nerve,” Kate said, “and desperation. I wish I’d been thinking more clearly. Burt was shot right in the heart. No child could have done that, not unless she was damn lucky.”
Sylvie flinched, and I tightened my arm around her. Once and for all, she needed to hear the absolute truth, knowing that neither she nor her mother was to blame.
“Is there any possibility he set you up deliberately?” I asked.
Kate shook her head. “I don’t think so. That’s not to say that he wouldn’t have been happy for me to take the blame. I guessed a long time ago that he helped Frank embezzle that money from the assessor’s office. He’s greedy, and he’s selfish.”
“What did you do with the rifle?”
“Threw it in the Elk River,” my mother said. “I never thought to open the breech and look for a bullet. No doubt it’s still in there. Unless, of course, Fairfax had the presence of mind to fire it off into the night.”
“It was a .22?”
Kate nodded. “Just like the pistol. Even if the wound had been bigger, I might not have noticed.”
For the first time since we’d come into the living room, Sylvie spoke. “All this time,” she said. “Hiding and lying and being afraid. All those secrets we didn’t need to keep. No childhood for me, and no life for you. What a waste.”
Kate got up and came over to sit down beside her. She put her head close to her daughter’s, and I could see very clearly what Sylvie might look like in thirty years. She’d still be blond, but gray streaks would appear at her temples, and the golden color of her skin would darken and subdue.
She said, “I’m far more sorry about the years you lost than I am for anything I might have missed. I was lucky enough to have a good childhood, and that’s what I wanted for you. I’d give anything to have been able to give you that.”
When Sylvie spoke again she said, “We still don’t know who poisoned Frank. Fairfax said he had nothing to do with that. We’re back at square one.”
Emma stirred in her seat. “No, we’re not. None of you thought to ask me why I stopped by here in the first place. And, by the way, it’s lucky I did. Bil didn’t seem to be getting through to Helen.”
“I don’t have your way with freaks,” I agreed. “So, why did you stop by?”
My mother was smiling. “Because I wanted to tell you that the county prosecutor has persuaded Sam to name his drug supplier.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
Emma lit a cigarette now and prepared to pontificate. “What it’s got to do with is fraud. Users often support their habit by becoming dealers, but Sam’s supplier came up with an even better plan. In addition to dried shiitake mushrooms, Sam’s friend has also been selling pre-rolled joints filled with dried-up weeds. Not weed, but weeds. A tiny bit of pot for verisimilitude and the rest all garbage. As you may recall, the Lilac Trailer Court has been Cowslip’s French Connection since Kate and I were in college.”
“Then Sam really did . . .” I began.
“No,” my mother said firmly, “he didn’t. Frank made the mistake of stopping by Lilac, looking for a quick fix. On Thursday, he had a few drinks in that bar downtown, the one that plays all the loud music.”
“The Underground?”
“That’s the one. He had a few, and then he bought a few, and once he’d made friends with a couple of likely looking ne’er-do-wells, they gave him directions to the right trailer, and he bought some joints. Unfortunately for him, he never got a chance to smoke them. When the sheriff’s deputies picked him up, he swallowed them.”
“The first time they arrested him or the second?” They all looked at me. “He was picked up twice,” I explained. “Tipper told me—he got it from an inside source at the sheriff’s department. He was arrested once at noon, and then again later in the afternoon. The first time, they just drove him out into the county and dropped him off with instructions to beat it to Spokane. It’s what they always do with vagrants.”
“It must have been the noon arrest,” my mother said thoughtfully. “That would have given the jimsonweed time to work in his gut over the next couple of hours.”
“So why has Sam suddenly decided to name names?”
Emma smiled grimly. “Because his supplier was stupid enough to try the dried-weed trick on him yesterday. He fired up a joint, took one whiff, and went ballistic. Your brother might not know his mushrooms, but he is a connoisseur of pot.”
Kate laughed out loud, and I could see that Sylvie was suppressing a smile. My mother looked at me.
“Aren’t you going to ask me the name of this entrepreneur?”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “Her name is Francie Stokes.”
Epilogue
We won the Proposition One fight by about three thousand votes. Its supporters promised to get it onto the ballot again for the 1996 election. Our joy was also tempered by the full slate of homophobes who were elected to the Idaho legislature and to represent us in the federal government. Still, a small victory was a victory nevertheless.
Nancy moved out of Sylvie’s apartment at the end of November, and I moved in. In fact, I was already living there—I just wasn’t paying rent. When it became official, I told Hugh first, and then I told Emma.
Sam was sitting on the front porch the day Sylvie and I came to collect the last of my boxes. He looked good. His skin was a rich brown, and he smiled easily. On the days after chemo, he often looked dull and ashy, and, on the really bad days, he had the look of someone who was living in two worlds. His eyes seemed to look through you and on to some other place. I tried to be present on those days, and afterwards, I always went home and rested with my head on Sylvie’s chest, listening to her heartbeat.
Francie Stokes was sent to reform school, and potheads all over Cowslip took joints, both good and bad, and flushed them down the toilet. Initially, she was charged with manslaughter, but her public defender, Naomi, pled her down. My mother, the old hypocrite, was furious.
Helen continued to work in the library. Her eyes took on a tranquilized look, and we all hoped she was getting some therapy. Sylvie and I knew that she was the one who’d chased us through the woods that night with a crowbar—she told us. She wasn’t trying to kill us, she said. She just wanted to scare us. She succeeded. Sylvie seemed to think we’d been in no real danger, but if she’d caught up with us, I didn’t doubt that she’d have taken a whack with that crowbar. Why not? She hated us both. And if we’d seen her, well, who knew?
Helen was also the one who phoned in the anonymous tip to Young. I wondered about this for a long time. She wanted Burt Wood officially dead and buried just as much as Kate did, but why would she care if the body was correctly identified as Frank? Though Sarah knew next to nothing of the whole Helen, Fairfax, Burt Wood saga, she was the one who gave me the best insight into how Helen could stir around in the past and present and fuck things up so badly.
I stopped by the library one day and Sarah, frazzled as usual, waved a stack of Post-It notes in my face.
“She doesn’t think,” Sarah said. “She doesn’t plan. Would you look at this?”
“It’s a bunch of Post-It notes.”
“Oh no it isn’t,” she said. “It’s that moron’s idea of serial title change.”
“You’re losing me,” I said.
“We hav
e a computer check-in system,” Sarah wailed. “We make serial title changes on that. We do not put Post-It notes over the new titles telling patrons it’s really the old title. Don’t you get it?”
I shook my head. “I’m not a librarian.”
“Neither is she,” Sarah snapped. “And she never will be. Everything Helen Merwin touches turns from sugar to shit.”
I agreed. Wholeheartedly.
Late at night, Sylvie and I talked about our families and their collective secrets. At first, we were both afraid that the whole story would have to come out. After all, Fairfax Merwin had killed a man. Gradually, however, we began to realize that this was a fact Sylvie and her mother had already lived with for sixteen years, and I wasn’t willing to destroy her family and my own to avenge someone like Burt Wood. If Fairfax had a conscience, we had to assume that was punishment enough.
My mother wasn’t worried at all. “Every small town is a collection of conspiracies,” she said. “You can’t imagine we’ve got dibs on the only horrible secret in Cowslip.”
Eventually we agreed—by silent mutual consent—never to mention it again.
Sylvie and I passed through the fall semester with appalling grades. By spring, however, we had settled into a satisfying domesticity and our grades improved. The Lesbian Avengers dispersed to fight new battles, and the Faeries, with the exception of Suzy, went back to Seattle. Suzy stayed and moved in with Donny Smith, who, wonder of wonders, came out. At first, things were tense in the sheriff’s department, but Donny said his co-workers were generally supportive. Sheriff Young set the positive tone—like my father, it seemed he’d had a lesbian aunt.
Tipper returned to Seattle and the University of Washington, still ambivalent about his relationship with Tom. He often called and left messages on our answering machine for Ward and June Cleaver.
One Saturday night in January, Sylvie and I sat on the devouring sofa and listened to Fumbling Toward Ecstasy. We had just begun to reminisce when someone pounded on the front door. Though I could guess who it was, I put my shirt back on and went to answer it anyway.
My mother pushed past me and marched straight into the living room.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but we need you at the hospital.”
Sylvie slipped up behind me and put an arm around my waist. We’d been waiting for the results of Sam’s latest tests. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I’m ready. Just let me get my coat on.”
“I’m coming too,” Sylvie said. “If that’s all right.”
Emma laughed. “Of course it’s all right, the more, the merrier. You might want to bring your camera, too—God knows he won’t be able to stop you from taking pictures.”
“You mean this isn’t . . . he’s not . . .”
“Your brother,” she said, “fell off the back of some bimbo’s moped and the tailpipe burned a hole in his ass. He’s hanging up in a traction harness and screaming at all the nurses. Are you coming?”
“With pleasure,” I said.
Joan Opyr
Joan Opyr’s real parents were the Queen and King of the Circus. Though born and bred in Raleigh, NC, she now considers herself a Wild Westerner through and through, from the top of her Resistol hat to the soles of her Justin ropers. A gifted novelist, Joan also believes that she was the inspiration for the Black-Eyed Peas song, “My Humps.”
Professionally, Joan is the Northern Idaho Editor for New West Magazine (www.newwest.net), a regular humor columnist for a number of newspapers, and, each and every Sunday, she co-hosts The Auntie Establishment and Brother Carl Show on Radio Free Moscow (www.krfp.org). Joan graduated from North Carolina State University twice, though you’d never know it to talk to her. In 1993, she finished the coursework for a PhD in Old English from The Ohio State University. She will never finish her dissertation.
Joan has been happily married to the same woman since the Crimean War. They live in Moscow, Idaho, with their two lovely children, three dogs, three cats, a dozen chickens, and a complete set of resident in-laws. Joan is a die-hard, yellow dog Democrat, who takes an active interest in local affairs—so active, in fact, that she’s thinking of training one of her dogs (or perhaps a chicken) in the fine art of bomb-sniffing.
As for her hobbies, well, she hardly likes to say.
Please visit Joan’s website at www.joanopyr.org or feel free to email her at [email protected]. She can’t promise that she’ll answer promptly, but she’s notorious for answering thoroughly.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am terribly nervous about writing this. What if I forget someone? What if forget someone really important? What if I forget someone who was vital to the writing of this book? Someone who helped me way back in the early days when this novel was just an outline and a 25-page draft? It’s not just possible that I’ll forget someone from that early struggle; it’s probable. I began writing Idaho Code in 1992. It took me seven years and seven drafts to finish it, another five years to sell it, and three more edits to hammer it into the book you now hold in your hand. Throughout this process, I have been shameless about asking friends, relatives, and the occasional unwary stranger to read a draft and let me know what they thought. A surprising number did so with apparent pleasure, and I am grateful to them. I don’t have the luxury of posing as an unloved, unappreciated, starving artist. I have received nothing but unstinting encouragement, flattery and praise, and many a helpless belly laugh in all the right places. What writer could ask for anything more?
Okay, I’d also like to sell Steven Spielberg the movie rights for a cool million, but I’m not greedy. Well, not excessively greedy. I’d donate at least ten five percent to charity.
These are the people who must be thanked. With the exception of my wife, they are not listed in order of importance but in order of memory, so, please, no fighting.
I thank my wife, Melynda Huskey, for her patience, her encouragement, her love and affection, and her cruel and ruthless editing. Melynda is herself a fine writer, and she is the smartest, bravest person I have ever known. She has read and re-read this text in search of “flagrant assholery,” and she has never been afraid to tell me when a joke or a scene or a character has fallen flat. Those of you who have the misfortune of living with a writer will know the courage this requires. Melynda is the Chesty Puller of author spouses, and I adore her.
I thank my in-laws, Rose and Don Huskey, Heather and Micah Jordan, Lew and Jill Huskey, and Molly Huskey for reading draft after draft; for their support and encouragement; and for always putting up a good fight. They are a constant source of inspiration to me, though, for legal purposes, I would like to point out that they are in no way reflected in any of the characters in this book. Any resemblance to Rose, especially, is purely coincidental. (What’s the difference between Rose Huskey and Emma Hardy? Emma has to do exactly what I write.)
Thank you to my wonderful, hilarious, ass-kicking agent and future sister-wife, Victoria Sanders, to her long-suffering partner, Diane Dickensheid, and to Victoria’s assistants, Imani Wilson and Benee Knauer. VS: when Steven Spielberg calls, tell him the price is now two million.
Thank you to my publishers, Kelly Smith and Marianne K. Martin of Bywater Books, and to Jean Redmann, who first said the magic words, “We want your book.” Thank you to Val McDermid for encouragement, advice, and a terrific blurb. (Did you know that your girlfriend really wants a border collie? You should get her one. A nice puppy sired by Scottish champions. Very cute. Very lively.)
Thank you to Marah Stets, genius editor, and to Patricia Koch, genius painter. Patricia’s paintings of the Palouse are a constant source of inspiration and I am so grateful to her for allowing her work to grace the cover of this book. What an honor.
To Polly Opyr, Julia Gothe, Jennie Staples, Saundra Lund, Keely Emerine Mix, Lois Blackburn, BJ Swanson, Robin Woods, Nicole Opyr, Micheal Opyr Pender, Johnny Pender, Mable J. Watkins, Lilah Amos, Kate deGroot, Laura Kemmink, Eve Strongoni, William Doelle, Connie Gibbs,
Debi Robinson-Smith, Deborah Love, Janice Corey, Dave Tilley, Carol Lorenger, Brian Carver, Mary Lowe, Maggie Thacker, Lisa Matthews, Mel Ashby, Lesa Luders, Lee Smith, Linda T. Holley, John Kessel, Gitta Bridges, Carmen Wilbourne, Pam Southworth, Kym Dye and Linda James, Carrie Bickle and Sally Blank, Cheryle and Teresa Myers, Bill London, Benton Falkirk, the entire Moscow-based Palmer family, librarians par excellence Donna Hanson and Pauline Baughman, Betsy Dickow and Bob Greene of Book People, Courtney Lowery and Jonathan Weber of New West Magazine, Mike Schultz of Stonewall News, and the late, wonderful, and much-beloved Marla Kale and Robbie Knott—thank you all for reading my work and for encouraging (and, in some cases, paying) me to write. I owe you a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.
Unless, of course, Steven Spielberg calls. Then, I promise each of you one some percent of the net film proceeds. That’s if it makes a profit. A really big profit. I mean truly enormous. Like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jurassic Park.
Copyright © 2006 by Joan Opyr
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