"Same, same."
"Roberta? Was that her name?"
"You remember her?"
"Do I remember? Eggs benedict? She's a doll, kiddo." I hear Dubie take an elbow to the ribs. He laughs.
"Right," I say. "That's her. Breakfast is her forte."
"He says breakfast is her forte," Dubie says to his wife, and she says something back I can't hear. "So what do you hear from Sharon?" he asks me. Sharon's my ex-wife. "Sharon," he says. "What do you hear from her?"
"I hear nothing."
"What about Adrienne? Don't you see her on weekends anymore?" Adrienne's my daughter.
"Nothing. Everything's broken down."
"Jesus, Dan, I don't know how you handle that . . ."
"One day at a time," I tell him.
"We saw 'em a few months ago. They had a hard time there for a while. Sharon was working for three-sixty at Olan Mills or some damn place and losing the house. Adrienne's the cutest little thing on earth. Which one would fully expect from you and Sharon. I don't know, pal."
"I'm up on my payments," I say. "I'm sending them everything I get. Virtually."
"Oh, I know. I don't mean that. It's hard anyway, you know. It's hard for them. And I know it's hard for you, too. It's hard. I'm not saying this to get you down," he says after a moment.
"I know."
I hear Elaine talking again in the background. "Roberta makes you happy?" he asks, evidently relaying a question.
"Yeah," I say. "I don't really think true happiness is in the cards. She's a very good girl. She's one of these thirty-year-old English majors, back to school to become a nurse and make a living. Bright, like an English major; down to earth, like nurses. I think she likes me okay. I'd do anything for her. You know," I say, realizing maybe I'm being too effusive, but I can't stop, I feel the release of pressure, "you know, she's twenty-nine, almost thirty—that's a different generation from us. Really. That crowd doesn't imagine anything that isn't there."
At the end of this, the point lost, I hear him talking in a low voice away from the phone. Then he comes back. "Elaine wants to know if you went through with your post-divorce daydream of buying something phallic like a Corvette or a big motorcycle."
"Doesn't she like phalluses?" I say.
Laughing, Dubie relays the question. "She says she likes phalluses okay, but not on the highway."
I hear Elaine say something else, then Dubie passes it along. "Elaine says she still thinks you and Sharon could have survived if you had just sought counseling. She says she thinks Sharon misses you."
The second he says this, I think of lonely Albert, staring off, nobody to tell his story to. I try to imagine going to him for marriage counseling, fifty bucks a pop.
"Tell Elaine survival wasn't the question."
"Well, what was it?" Dubie asks point-blank. "We're your friends. We've always wondered."
"She wasn't happy, and I wasn't happy. How's that for starters?"
Elaine's talking in the background. "How old's Adrienne?" Dubie's asking me. "When was she born? Elaine wants to know."
"1975," I tell him.
"Lord, I remember that!" He laughs. "You rented that house next to a K Mart dumpster and had that old orange Vega."
"That's pretty much how I'm living now," I say, a joke sort of.
I hear Elaine recalling something, and Dubie listens, then relays it: "Elaine remembers how she and Sharon took off, when we were all up in Vancouver, and we couldn't find them. And then we finally caught up to them in this French-type place, remember? Where they were playing Leonard Cohen."
I remember that very well. We were young then, and I recall courting guiltily the possibility that some night on that trip Dubie and I might swap, one of those quiet sexual fantasies that pass by, mercifully not acted upon. Now I'm not sure I can even picture Elaine.
"Hey, Dubie," I say. "Tell her to stop with the flashbacks, for Christ's sake. I . . ."
I stop. Both of them are quiet.
"I see," Dubie says after a while.
I feel a sudden swell of emotion in my chest, not immediately recognizable to me. It's anger or sadness, one. "Sharon cared less about me or men in general, Dubie. Tell Elaine that. She spent endless hours over coffee with the witches—no offense to Elaine—in the neighborhood. It took five hours of foreplay every two-and-a-half months just to roll her over. I don't really think I turned her on anymore. It was like, she had her baby so thank you very much. She misses the routine and the income and the security, and she probably will have to get out of that house—the mortgage is a killer. She didn't love me anymore."
In the background Elaine is buzzing, her voice sounding disgusted. "Tell him he ought to check the statistics on how many households there are where it's the woman who's starved sexually."
Just at the end of this, Dubie covers the receiver and says something to her. It seems to be an attempt to get her to back off, because it's very quiet on the other end for a moment after that. Then I think I hear her mumble that I wasn't such a great catch myself. Dubie doesn't relay it, whispers something to her.
"And don't say 'Poor Daniel,' " I say to him.
"How'd you know I was thinking that?" Dubie says quietly, an audible smile. "No, really. I understand."
The word "understand" feels very good coming into my head. I think he does. I think a little communication might have taken place despite Elaine. I tell him how, living alone, suddenly I feel close to death, and far from the time when I was young. I tell him it's strange making love to a woman who didn't know me when I was twenty-six. I don't know why but suddenly I'm telling him about Michelle's visitation. I tell him I didn't even know the girl, or her child or her husband. I tell him about the creepy get-well card, and how it seemed like Michelle's casket actually rocked when it was bumped, even though Roberta didn't think so, and how the flowers fell.
Long Pine
There was a low, flat flow to the road, sundown. Skidmore, who'd been hiking fast since his last ride dropped him in the middle of the sandhills, was sitting now on his old suitcase, the kind with the pouches on the sides, deep in scrufty grass on the road's shoulder, dreaming of law school. Whole minutes passed, he didn't move. Cars flew by, station wagons, sixteen-wheelers blew by and honked loud as they passed and Skidmore didn't move, thinking about a blond he'd known in law school, back in Louisville, back before Fiona and he met—Fiona the wild-eyed impressionable Valdosta girl who carried a Buck hunting knife in her boot and thought she was a writer. Skidmore was thinking of the blond way back before her.
He took a swig off his Jack Daniel's. He'd told that poor fabulous blond girl so many lies and crossed his lying-ass trail so many times with her that the pupils in her eyes actually came to be shaped like question marks. Her mouth held a perpetual pout, and that only made her more beautiful to him. She didn't look half as tough as she turned out to be. Skidmore left her after they had a spat and she fired two shots from her .357 into her own refrigerator as he was walking past it. She finally did become a lawyer, he heard. Skidmore thinking of it he chuckled almost proudly out there on the road—Skidmore was a razzle-dazzle guy. He could unanswer more questions in a week than most men in a lifetime. It had become a pattern in his life. Give him a relationship and a couple of months on his own resources, and Skidmore could bring ruination on everything—he could bring more ruination than whole defoliation programs, whole societal collapses, whole holy wars. He actually heard one of those bullets whiz past his belt buckle.
Out on the road, though, thinking about that blond, he could only really think of the good things: that he had loved her so much, that there wouldn't ever be another like her, so playful and evil in bed, that he was better for having known her. He didn't want any part of most of his wretched past any more, but he wouldn't have minded plucking that blond girl out of his memory and standing her up there on the road and telling her he'd be hers forever if she just promised to love him the way she did back in Louisville in law school and not lie like a lo
t of women. He tried hard to resurrect the texture of her right out there on a highway in Nebraska at nightfall twelve years later.
He was headed for Long Pine, never to be seen again. Fiona, it happens, had lived in Long Pine. She waited tables and sang in some dive there—it was where she met Yank, in fact. She'd talked about it being a hide-out town, full of rogues and crazy women drinking all day and all night. She said it was a town Jimmy Hoffa might be buried in, if he was buried in Nebraska at all, or where the guys who got him were hiding, because it was so weird, disgusting and far from everything else. Nobody from most places had ever heard of Long Pine. The way Fiona talked, Long Pine was the most dreaded, worthless place you ever saw, so Skidmore was headed there to be disgusting like he deserved if he couldn't even get a simple vagabond woman to take a simple picture off her goddamned wall.
Skidmore raised the bottle of Jack Daniel's again. He looked back down the road to see if Indian braves were trailing him. He squinted, looking way, way down. In Long Pine he wouldn't have to worry about any of his Fort Robinson past, including all the Indians and white boys who'd threatened to get him if they ever got out of the slammer, including that damned exasperating Fiona, poor, confused ratty little girl holed up above a sleazy downtown Fort Robinson cowboy bar all knotted up over her novel, which she already knew could never be as good as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Poor Fiona, cornered by art.
It was bad enough that she absolutely refused to remove the picture of her and Yank from the wall above her bed. (The picture showed Yank with his arm around her, his left arm, the hand down lightly on her breast, a menacing look in his eye. They were drunk, toasting the camera with cans of malt liquor. Yank was wearing the elastic band from his jockey shorts around his head.)
"You gotta take that picture down," Skidmore had said to her. "I don't mean to complain, but you have to cut that picture off the wall."
"Get tough," she told him, laughing. "He's a friend of mine. It was a time in my life—I like to remember it. I like to remember the farm."
"He left you without notice."
"That's just the way he was," she said.
"I'm asking for some consideration here. Couldn't you hang it in the hall, or the bathroom, if it has to hang on the wall around here, and not over the bed?"
"Put it out of your mind, Mister. I'm my own boss and interior decorator. I hang what I want hung. The picture stays."
The look in Yank's eye in the picture would sometimes intrude into Skidmore's daydreams—a rough, wild-ass look, like the sky was the limit. Skidmore had argued a lot of Indians and white boys into jail who had a look like that in their eye, and he always knew it wasn't the argument that got them—it was the look. And in the picture there was a look in Fiona's eye, too. She loved Yank. She was completely accustomed to his desperate style of life. It gave her material to write about. Skidmore could tell she was intrigued by old soldiers like Yank, the romance of having lived on the edge, as opposed to lawyer types like Skidmore who wrangled CO status and wimped out the sixties in the Caribbean. How could Skidmore compete with Yank? That damned picture, it was a real problem.
Then came the day when the straw broke the thing's back. They were going to have a real date, and he would come over and they would walk to a movie or something, stroll in the old cavalry fort just outside of town, and he trudged up the hill from his trailer to her apartment, and what happened? She wasn't there. They had a date! Well, if she felt so free as to run roughshod over an actual date, well then, screw her. Skidmore hit the road. No one was ever better to her, for sure not Yank. Skidmore couldn't live that way anymore. He hit the road. Now he was going to live the risky life. He knew her standing him up was the sign she didn't love him with the all-encompassing devotion he required of his women. He knew very well that women will lie to you if you aren't careful. Just by looking at her, you never think a woman will lie (especially if she's one of the types that curl their eyelashes, one of the types that look at you with that one kind of look certain girls look at you with), but she will, she'll lie and keep lying even after that if she wants to, because women, Skidmore was thinking to himself out on the road, are a bunch of liars if you aren't careful. He swallowed four square ounces of Jack Daniel's and another hit for good measure. Then he thought someone was right behind him with a tomahawk and he stood up and whirled around fast, letting out a loud war whoop and at the same time letting fly a karate kick, but he was wrong—no one was there. In the last light of day, he sat on his suitcase watching a magpie eat a smashed jackrabbit a hundred yards down the road. The white in the magpie's wings flashed pinkish in the setting sun.
Skidmore didn't feel bad at all, leaving Fort Robinson forever. It had been a terrible town, and it held bad memories. He was a terrible lawyer and he knew it, but he knew he could be better if he could just leave his past behind him, these women and all his problems. From where he was standing now, Fort Robinson was eighty miles off to the west and Long Pine was ninety miles off to the east and he couldn't get a ride, and, the sun gone down, the highway finally disappeared in the dark and he was sitting there on his suitcase and all there was, all there was at all, was sky. So that's what he thought about, staring up. He didn't know the name of any of the stars, or which was which. He tried to spot a constellation but couldn't see a one. Somehow, in this mood, he knew if the stars could shit they'd shit on him. His soul was sad, he thought to himself. The road, the land, the deep, black, living void above, they were all silent, and looking up Skidmore began to feel as though he might be pulled right off the earth. What would that feel like? He would disappear straight up, into the sparkling black sky. For a moment it seemed like that would be okay, but then it was terrifying to him. The black well rumbled above him like Judgment Day. He looked down at the ground instead.
It must be guilt, he thought to himself, that keeps me from properly communing with nature. He ran his fingers through his hair and scratched at his scalp. There was a time when he was a little boy and did a lot of camping that he had struggled to become nonchalant in the presence of nature—pushed hard to become nonchalant, in fact, and almost achieved it. Now nature was strange to him.
It must be guilt, he thought to himself. He knew well that women weren't the only ones who lied. He took a drink. Deep in his heart it occurred to him that maybe he was mean, like all his old friends used to accuse him of before he took off. McFarland still told him he was mean when from time to time they would chance to meet. Sometime, he thought, I'm going to have to stop being dishonest and lying to a bunch of people all the time. He knew the ambivalence toward truth hammered into him in law school was not the problem. He had been particularly acclimated to that way of thinking long before law school. Truth to tell, when he went by to pick up Fiona and she wasn't there, he kind of smiled. He thought it was pretty spunky of her. A little revenge for all the times Skidmore said he'd be there and didn't make it. But you expect that sort of thing from a man—freedom is part of his soul. For Fiona to turn around and do it back—she really got him, he thought to himself, and laughed grudgingly.
Well, whatever. He determined that when he got settled in Long Pine he would examine his poor hurting soul and by an act of will become a better person. He decided to have a glass of red beer when he got to Long Pine, and he'd tell them that he was there to start a law office, and he'd never let them talk him into playing on their goddamned redneck softball teams and chasing women the way all the guys in their thirties did out in Nebraska, usually at Godfather's Pizza or a certain bar, usually after the softball games but sometimes after church or on nights when nothing was scheduled. Television had ruined the whole culture out there, he thought to himself. Everybody tried to act like they were in a Lite Beer commercial.
Skidmore was feeling drunk and lonely. What do they want from me? he thought, pretending that he was a tragic character caught in the complexity of the human dilemma. He tried shouting it, "What do they want from me?", out across the sandhills. Then he thought he heard something
in the bushes and sat perfectly still. Maybe it was Jesus answering his painful cry—Jesus appearing to him at last and asking him to become an apostle. "Where have you been, Lord?" Skidmore said aloud. He waited. But nothing supernatural happened.
He loved that blond, he loved her more than anybody else in the world, more than anybody before her and certainly since. Maybe she had fired a couple of shots at him, acts of pure womanly passion—but never, never had she willfully stood him up. He tried to recall her name. He tried hard. She had a strange name, it was Mary, no, it was Helen, no, rhymed with Helen, no, it was Alice, no, what was that name? he thought to himself and the whiskey went down his throat, rolled down, tasting like gasahol.
He looked back and forth, up and down the road. He was completely alone. Yank would come after him. Cut him up for leaving Fiona without notice. Skidmore shook his head. The dark was making him paranoid. He mumbled the Lord's Prayer to himself, a low vocal drone, over and over, and he relaxed. A couple of hours passed in which he was a complete blank. Finally a semi came along.
"Hey, boy, you're gonna die out here if I don't give you a ride," the driver said when Skidmore opened the door on the passenger side. "And I'm gonna die if you don't give me a hit off that bottle in your shirt."
"Kill it, it's yours," Skidmore said, handing it over, then climbing up into the cab and pulling his suitcase up behind him. "We're both gonna die sometime."
"You're right about that, hoss," the driver said. He put the bottle between his legs while he pulled the rig back out onto the highway and shifted up through the gears.
"I've been out there since three this afternoon, I swear. Goddamn! Nobody wanted to give me a ride." They had to talk pretty loud.
"You oughtta stick your goddamned thumb up in the air sometime, you jerk! It's the sign you wanna hitch a ride with somebody. I was watchin' you when I was comin' up—thought you was a commemorative statue. This Jack Daniel's shit"—he waved the bottle—"it does that to your brain." He rolled his eyes like it already did it to his brain.
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