by Tim Sandlin
She seemed to be looking for someone because she crossed the street and cut into the town square, more or less doubling back on herself. She stopped at the war memorial in the middle of the square and looked at the base where the names of Teton County vets are all listed. I figured I’d saunter up behind her and say something like “Fancy meeting you here.”
I came within three or four steps when Colette turned her head and spit on the sidewalk. This caused me to pause in surprise. It didn’t feel proper to walk up to a woman who had just spit. She might be embarrassed. Or she might have a disgusting object in her mouth.
More than surprised, I was also kind of impressed. Colette’s spit technique was forceful and solid, with a high arch and no trailing drool. It was boyish—like her punt. My God, I thought, what if Colette is really a boy? How would a sex change redefine our relationship?
While I stood there working out all the possible ramifications, Colette walked away. She crossed the street diagonally into an outdoor mall sort of thing. It had a walkway with shops on both sides and an open-air Mexican restaurant at the far end. I ran around the corner all the way to the restaurant end of the mall. Tucking in my shirttail, I checked my glasses for grease spots. Then I wandered into the mall. Keeping it casual, I walked past the Mexican restaurant, past the four or five gift shops, all the way to the other end of the walkway—no Colette.
Turning back along the line of shops, I stepped into each one and looked at the customers. The last shop was a boutique.
“Is anyone in the dressing room?” I asked the lady in charge.
She looked at me and said, “No.”
“Do you mind if I just open the door and make sure?”
“What?”
“Can I look in the dressing room to make certain no one is in there?”
“No one is in there.”
“Do you mind if I see for myself?”
She stood between me and the dressing room for a moment. Then she said, “Go right ahead, but no one is there.”
I opened the door. The dressing room was empty. “Thank you,” I said.
I walked over to the Mexican restaurant and looked at everyone eating and everyone standing in line. Cupping, my hands around my mouth, I called “Colette.”
Some of the people eating looked up at me. I tried again. “Colette.” She didn’t answer.
***
Colette called me that same afternoon. I answered the phone on the second ring. “Hello.”
There was a short silence. “Why are you doing this to me?” Colette asked.
“Hello,” I said. “Who is this?”
Another pause. “Who do you think it is?”
I looked at the phone mouthpiece. “Colette, is that you, Colette?”
“Yes, it’s me. Now answer the question.”
“It’s awfully nice of you to call, Colette.”
“Kelly, why are you doing this to me?”
“Why am I doing this?”
“You heard me.”
“Gee, Colette, I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about why.”
“You mean you’re tearing up my life and you haven’t thought about why?”
“Does that mean I’m having an effect on you?”
She hung up.
I dialed her number and Colette answered halfway through the first ring.
“That means I’m having an effect on you,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“You said I was tearing up your life. That’s an effect, isn’t it, Colette?”
“Stay the hell away from me,” she said calmly.
“That’s a meaningful suggestion,” I said, “but could I offer another course of action? We could have lunch together tomorrow.”
She hung up again. I called back and let the phone ring fifty-three times, but I guess Colette left the house because she didn’t answer all afternoon.
The next couple of days, I called quite a few times—too many to count. It occurred to me that Colette was not answering the phone on purpose. I knew, though, that Danny had to have a way to get hold of her just to find out what to bring home from town every evening. That meant they had a telephone code.
Telephone codes are a snap to break. Everyone uses the same one. Wednesday, I dialed Colette’s number, let it ring twice, and hung up. Then I called right back.
She picked up the phone. “Danny?”
“Gotcha,” I said. Colette hung up.
***
Friday night, a young deputy sheriff walked through the swinging double doors that separate the kitchen from the dining room at work. He walked through the wrong side of the door and almost knocked over a waitress. My dish station was just off the two doors.
“You’re supposed to go through the right-hand door,” I said.
“You Kelly Palamino?” he asked. He had sideburns down below his cheekbones.
“Did you hear me?” I said. “There’s an In door and an Out door. You came in the Out door and almost upset a waitress carrying a tray.”
“Yes or no, are you Kelly Palamino?”
“Let’s straighten this out first. Have you ever worked in a restaurant?”
“No.” The deputy walked over to the line cook. “You got a Kelly Palamino working here?”
The line cook pointed to me. The deputy walked back.
“Are you going to apologize to the waitress or not?” I asked.
The waitress walked back into the kitchen, carrying an empty tray.
I said, “Darlene, the deputy has something to say to you.”
She leaned on her right leg and waited. The deputy looked from her to me and back again. “I’m sorry I came out the In door,” he mumbled.
“In the Out door,” I corrected.
“Okay, in the Out door. I’m sorry I came in the Out door and bumped your tray.”
“Don’t let it happen again,” Darlene said. She walked to the line cook and called in an order.
The deputy held out a folded sheet of paper. “Here.”
I took it.
“This is a warrant for your arrest,” he said. “It is called a peace warrant because it does not go into effect until such time as you come within fifty feet of a woman named Colette Hart.”
I unfolded the paper and read a couple of wherefores and such as’s. “Bet it covers the telephone too,” I said.
“Yep. You understand, you won’t be arrested unless you approach Mrs. Hart.”
“What are the charges if I do approach her?”
“We’ll think of something. Harassment, assault, obscene phone calls, attempted rape. We can put ‘conspiracy to’ in front of anything and hit you with it.”
I refolded the paper carefully and stuck it into my right-hand back pocket. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“With her father-in-law, it doesn’t have to be fair, just close to legal. Don’t go near that girl, understand?”
“I understand.”
The deputy sheriff turned and walked out the door.
***
The next Wednesday, Lizbeth and I discussed why I act like an idiot sometimes.
“My mother pioneered the halter and leash on children,” I said.
“The what?”
“The leash. The little halter goes around the kid’s chest and the leash fastens in back.”
Lizbeth smiled. “Why does a leash explain your current actions?”
“People made fun of me. Children used to bark behind my back.”
Lizbeth sneezed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Must be something in the air. Go on, Kelly.” She reached for a Kleenex and blew her nose.
“When I was twelve, Mom stopped talking to me. One night at the supper table, she said that since I didn’t love her or appreciate all the things she did for me, she was ne
ver going to speak to me again. She didn’t for a week.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“How do you expect? I’m twelve years old. My mother says I’ve broken her heart. I had no idea what I’d done, I just knew it was my fault.”
“What did your dad do?”
“Nothing. There was nothing he could do.”
Lizbeth spoke into the Kleenex. “So, what’s going to happen in your life?” What’s going to happen in your life? was one of Lizbeth’s stock therapeutic questions.
“I’ll marry Colette sooner or later.”
“What if she doesn’t want to marry you.”
“She will.” I gave Lizbeth one of those meaningful straight-in-the-eye stares. “She will.”
“You can’t force other people to cooperate with your dreams, Kelly.”
“It’s not a dream. It’s fate.”
“But she won’t talk to you.”
I crossed my legs, right ankle over left knee. “I’ll wait. That marriage can’t last more than two years, then I’ll be around to pick her up. Besides, I have a plan.”
Lizbeth lowered the Kleenex and leaned forward a little. “What plan?”
“I’m going to swoop down out of the mountains and fly away with her.”
Lizbeth rapid-fired three sneezes in succession. She looked up at me with tears in both eyes. “You’re going to fly away with her?”
“Like Peter Pan.”
***
I never expected anyone to want me enough to marry me. Even when I used to fantasize about true love and fulfillment, I didn’t dare dream of a tall, blond woman. Julie was lustful. She was desired by strangers. When I suddenly found myself living in New Orleans, married to her, the feeling was unreal. I stopped thinking and got into the bad habit of saying “Jeez, Louise” many times a day.
Julie was a true child of the streets. Raised in Dallas, she came of age hustling her existence in the freak ghettos of Atlanta and New Orleans. Urban squalor was so much her element that anyone who saw us together knew immediately Julie was the person to contend with. Hippies, Moonies, and transvestites respected her to the point that I became something of a sidekick.
Which was okay by me. My own background ran to east Idaho and college-town Arkansas. Junkies intimidated me. I called pimps “sir.” Julie could hardly believe my naïveté in the necessary skills of modern society.
“You don’t spare-change right, you know nothing about inner-city hitchhiking. Can you tell if a bar is lesbian before you walk in the door?”
“There weren’t any lesbian bars in Lancaster.”
“Do you know the difference between selling blood and selling plasma?”
“No.” .
Julie shook her head in wonder.
“I can snowshoe up a steep hill. I can skin an elk and cook brook trout à la Hemingway. How many whores on Ursuline Avenue can do that?”
Tousling my hair, she laughed. “God must protect the helpless.”
I like to think of New Orleans as our carefree period. No debts. No responsibilities. We had nothing to do with each day but live it. We met Rick in New Orleans. He was a cook at the Hilton, where I washed dishes and Julie waitressed. Most nights after work, the three of us bought a couple bottles of awful wine and roamed the back streets, watching the city put on its show.
Julie knew a blues bar where white people usually weren’t welcome. We’d sit at long board tables and pass joints to old men with rose-colored eyes and catheters. A sad derelict named Babe Stovall sang raspy lyrics behind a guitar that seemed to be made from sheet metal. Sometimes Julie sat next to Babe on a beer box, moaning the harmonies. Babe let her drink from his absinthe bottle.
Before dawn, Julie would lead Rick and me through the near-empty streets to the levee along the Mississippi where we sprawled silently on the rocks, me on the right, Julie in the middle, Rick a little below us on the left. The three of us would share a last bottle of wine while the sun rose pink above the river.
Julie and I made love every day in those years. We had an apartment off Esplanade. Most afternoons we played Scrabble, then made love, then took a shower and went to work. Scrabble has turned me on ever since.
Looking back, I can see even then the romance was seeping out of the marriage. One hot, damp afternoon in August, we made love a long time—seemed like hours. Julie must have gotten off six times. Afterward we lay on our backs in the sweaty sheets and she smoked a cigarette.
We weren’t touching. It was way too hot to touch. “Kelly,” Julie said, staring at the ceiling, “did you ever wonder what it would be like to fuck somebody who was more than a friend?”
***
The day before Julie moved out, while she was at work, I tore sheets of paper into a couple hundred strips and wrote messages like I love you and cannot live without you, and Hi, pal, remember me. I hid the strips in her stuff—between the pages of books, in pockets of clothes she hardly ever wore, between the dishes, everywhere.
I bet Julie still hasn’t found them all.
***
Cora Ann should have been suspicious when I asked to go hang gliding with her. I mean, there are two basic philosophies about outdoor sports around here. Cora Ann’s group “goes for it.” They climb peaks, ski down mountains, kayak boiling rivers, strap themselves to kites and jump off cliffs—thrill-seekers.
The second group is “laid back.” We hike. We cross country ski, canoe lakes, lie under trees and watch the clouds change. Cora Ann is a jock. She could no more sit next to a stream all afternoon, listening to the water and watching trees grow, than I could plug myself into a kayak and shoot the Death Hole Rapids.
Anyhow, I spent an entire Thursday afternoon watching pretty Cora Ann jump off a bluff and float slowly to the ground. She said it was fun.
I drove to the Teton County Library and checked out Fly: The Complete Book of Sky Sailing, by Rick Carrier—even read most of it. He says only a suicidal fool would make his first flight from a high point without any instruction. I say only fools fall in love. Or something like that.
I waited until Monday so everyone but Colette would be at the bank. Then I stole Cora Ann’s hang glider. I tied it to the top of the bug and drove toward the Broken Hart.
It was a nice day for stealing a hang glider, warm, with enough breeze that a regular paper kite could have flown easily, though I wasn’t sure if a hang glider needed the same wind as a dollar Kmart kite.
Aspens shimmered. Lupines bloomed. The Tetons stood there like they were posing for a postcard. About two hundred yards down from where I parked the car the night I spent in the tree, a jeep trail cut off west through the woods toward the base of the hill. I followed the track until it dipped into the creek. Then I parked the bug between a couple of cottonwoods and got out.
Untying the glider from the bug’s top, I lifted it onto my right shoulder. I remembered that I hadn’t locked the car, so I put the hang glider on the ground and rolled up the windows and locked the doors.
I picked the glider back up and waded through the creek and started up the hill. As I sloshed through the bubbling water, the creek did a scene from the old Dick Van Dyke Show. It was one of those office scenes where Buddy, Sally, and Rob are working on gags. I couldn’t help but wonder where the creek had heard a Dick Van Dyke rerun.
Gliders weigh in the thirty-five pound region, which is a lot to carry on your shoulder up a hill—a lot for my skinny shoulder, anyway. I climbed about halfway up the slope before realizing the library book was still in the bug, so, setting the glider on the ground, I walked back down, unlocked the car, found the book, sat in the front seat a moment, then got back out and relocked the doors and walked up to the glider.
When you forget something and must return to the house or car or wherever to get it, it is bad luck just to grab whatever it was you forgot and leave. Always, always, sit fo
r at least ten seconds. That’s one of the rules my daddy taught me that I would never think about breaking. His other rule in life was “Always put the right shoe on first.”
Way up on the hill I found a nice, clear, gently sloping spot with a beautiful view of the Snake River and the valley buttes. I set the glider down and faced downwind and took a leak. My hands felt sweaty. Suddenly, jumping off a mountain seemed like a drastic thing to do, even for love.
I sat on a rock and thought about Colette a long time. Thought about her eyes and cheekbones and her hair and the way she walked with her toes pointed straight ahead. I thought about her face after she punted the football over the rectory. The more I thought about Colette, the more I knew this was the way to win her love.
Women are impressed by desperate flashiness.
There’s a trick to putting together a hang glider: Have someone help who has done it before. The construction process took most of the morning. I got the rigging wires backward. The front one was too long. The short one didn’t go anywhere. The control bar attached to the control box, but I couldn’t find the quick-release pin. I finally quit looking and figured I just wouldn’t quick-release.
After that, things went together pretty smoothly. I swung the crossbar out at a right angle to the keel, attached the king post wire to the nose assembly, lowered the tail section, rotated my lock nut, and spread my wings. Like putting together a model airplane at home, only I had to fly in this one and I didn’t get stoned on the glue.
One bolt didn’t seem to fit anywhere. I decided it couldn’t be important, so I stuck it in my pocket.
She looked real pretty, lying there all powder-blue in the sun, the fabric kind of glistening and sparkling. I felt good about the whole thing.
My flight plan was to take off, glide north around the edge of the hill, then cut back east toward the Hart ranch. If everything worked, I’d fly into Colette’s waiting arms. If it didn’t, I’d claim treacherous crosswinds blew me off course and landing at the ranch was a mistake. In my fantasy, I dreamed of scooping her up with one arm as I flew by and, regaining altitude, flying across the Tetons into Idaho. That seemed like too much to hope for.
My heavily suppressed realistic side said I’d never get the damn thing off the ground.