Sex and Sunsets: A Novel

by Tim Sandlin

  Colette stopped again. “Between babies and land with Danny?”

  “Yes, which do you want first?”

  She leaned her head back and exhaled. “I can’t imagine having a baby by Danny.”

  “How about me?”

  “How about you.”

  “Can you imagine having a baby by me?”

  “No.”

  At the top of the rise, we turned and looked at the view below. It was nice—bubbling brook, valley floor, dark green mountains in the distance. I touched Colette’s hand again. She didn’t pull back.

  “Let’s sit down,” I said.

  She looked around. “Where?”

  “Over here.” I pointed with my free hand. “There’s a grassy spot where we can sit and watch the sky.”

  “The sky?”

  “Yes.”

  I sat cross-legged on a clump of grass with a little bank behind it so I could lean back should the occasion for leaning back come along. Colette sat next to me. I had to let go of her hand in order to sit down, but as soon as she got settled, I picked it up again.

  “Don’t do this, Kelly,” she said, but she didn’t move her hand.

  I shifted around so I was facing Colette and picked up the other hand. I turned her palms so I could look down at them both. “Do you love him?” I asked, looking at her hands.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Do you love me?” I raised my eyes to look at hers. Her eyes seemed hurt.

  “How could I?”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “God, Kelly, I don’t know.” We sat there awhile, staring at each other’s eyes. “Everything is so complicated,” Colette said.

  “What’s complicated? You don’t love Danny and you do love me.”

  Colette broke the eye contact. “Jesus.” There were tears in her eyes. On the outside corners, then underneath the pupils, tears formed.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Jesus.” She blinked twice and turned to the side. I released her left hand and put my arm around her shoulders. She leaned against me. “I’m so fucked up,” Colette said. “What am I going to do?”

  A tear came out of her eye. It left a little trail down to her cheekbone where it stopped. I let go of her other hand and reached over to touch the tear.

  “You’re okay,” I said.

  Colette looked at the sky. “Jesus.” She kind of slid down until she was lying mostly on the grass with her head in my lap, facing away from me, toward the valley floor. I touched her ear and brushed the hair out of her face.

  “It’s pretty here, isn’t it?” Colette sniffed.

  “You’re safe with me.”

  “Dirk would have liked you. He liked weird people.” She stared out at the clouds coming up behind the mountains on the other side of the valley. “I can’t leave Danny. He loves me. We’ve only been married a month.”

  “I know.”

  She didn’t move for a long time. “But you are right. I don’t love him—not the way I’d want to love a husband. He’s such a nice guy and he takes care of me, but I just don’t feel what you’re supposed to feel.”

  I said, “You love me.”

  Colette turned her head to look up at me. “I don’t see how that’s possible. But maybe I—” A funny look came across Colette’s face. “What?” She raised her head and put her hand on my jeans zipper. “Did you whack off on the way out from town?”

  I put my hand next to hers. The jeans were damp and a little sticky. “Oh, that. Some hitchhiker gave me a blow job.”

  Colette sat up. “Male or female?”

  “Male or female what?”

  “Did a male or female hitchhiker give you a blow job?”

  “Female. She just got into the valley, works at Colter Bay and doesn’t know anybody. She seemed kind of lonesome,”

  “So you let her suck your cock?”

  I didn’t answer. Colette jumped up and started running down the hill. I caught up with her partway down in a real steep spot. The creek said, “A wise patient never mixes an anticoagulant with an anticonvulsant.”

  I grabbed Colette’s arm. “What’s the matter?”

  Colette was crying. She threw my hand off her arm. “Fuck off, Kelly.”

  “I just want to know why you’re acting like this.”

  She spun to face me. “You tried to convince me to leave my husband. I was almost listening, and five minutes ago you pulled your dick out of some slut’s mouth.”

  “She didn’t look like a slut. She was from Utah.”

  Colette pushed me away. She turned and ran down the hill too fast. Partway down, she tripped, falling forward and rolling a long ways. By the time I got there, she was up and crashing through the trees.

  I stopped at the spot where she fell. Cupping my hands on the sides of my mouth, I called, “You didn’t sleep alone last night.”

  Down by the dam, Colette stopped for a moment. Her voice floated up the hill. “Go to hell, Kelly.”

  I stood with my arms at my sides while Colette pulled Dixie’s reins off the branch, jumped on the mare’s back, and rode away. The creek tumbled and sang, “You screwed that one up good.”

  4

  Julie always gave horrible blow jobs. I think she was bad on purpose so she wouldn’t have to give them often. They came on Christmas and my birthday—holiday orals. The best job I ever had was from a real young girl in Blackfoot, Idaho. She couldn’t have been over thirteen. Had an unbelievably long tongue that she wrapped around me as if I was a corndog.

  I heard our scoutmaster in Lancaster gave good head, but I never found out if this was true or just vicious rumor. I’ve always felt I missed something by not having a homosexual encounter in the scouting movement.

  ***

  Early in the summer of 1975 I sold an ounce of marijuana to an undercover policeman and Julie and I had to leave New Orleans quickly. There was no time to pick up the last paychecks from work, tell Rick we were leaving, or even gas up the bus. We pulled out five minutes ahead of the parish narcotics squad.

  I watched the rearview mirror all the way to Shreveport, where we sold the bus and crossed the state line into Texas. We hitchhiked to Oklahoma City, bought the VW bug, and drove on to Dumas, Texas, where we checked into a motel that advertised CLEAN RESTROOMS and TORNADO CELLARS, and slept for the first time in forty-eight hours. The next day we drove to Jackson Hole.

  I say we drove, though I did all the driving. Julie never learned how to operate a car. She said it was too much responsibility. The trip across Wyoming on Interstate 80 was not very pleasant. The wind blew the bug all over the highway. Every time a semi passed, we were almost sucked under the rear wheels.

  On top of that, Julie was in a foul mood. She didn’t want to leave New Orleans and blamed me for our forced departure. I think she was angry about leaving without saying anything to Rick. She sat against the far door and bitched all the way from Laramie to Rock Springs—two hundred miles of continuous nag.

  “It’s all your fault.”

  “I know.”

  “Look at this. There’s nothing. No trees, no buildings, I could die out here.”

  “You could die in a city.”

  “At least people would know I was dead. If I die here, no one will find the body for decades.”

  Julie’s whole life had been led between Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia. She had never seen Wyoming—never had any desire to see Wyoming. My theory is the emptiness, all that vast nothing of the Red Desert, threw her off center. Like a Siamese cat, Julie liked cozy boxes, definite edges to her territory. She wanted to feel that she fit into a special niche in the universe, and Wyoming, with its hundreds of miles of rolling desert, intimidated her. So, swamped by insecurity, she took it out on me.

  Finally, tired of her complaints, I pul
led into the Outlaw Inn in Rock Springs for a drink. At that time Julie and I, like thousands, maybe even millions, of old-line dope fiends, were making the inevitable transition from drugs to alcohol, and like practically everyone else in our generation, we wasted some time on the missing link between the two—tequila. First we drank it straight and pure, the way a true drug abuser always takes his medicine. Later we moved on to tastier forms, sunrises and margaritas, before finally graduating to the real middle-class-alcoholism drinks, scotch or bourbon and water.

  That afternoon in the Outlaw Inn, we had just left the hippie period 1200 miles back down the road, so we took our tequila straight with salt and lemon. Julie and I sat on padded bars tools, throwing down shots and admiring the photographs of dead desperadoes until after dark. As the glow rose, Julie’s sense of companionship rose with it, and she became a friendly insecure woman instead of a bitchy insecure woman. She leaned against my arm and kissed me once in public, something she would never have done in New Orleans. She told the bartender she was going to stick with me in spite of me being a dunce. He said that was nice.

  Smashed, I bought a pint for the road and jammed the bug in gear, heading north. Julie propped the bottle between her legs and talked.

  When I first met Julie, she had been waiting all her life for someone to talk to, someone who would listen to her. She came from a large family where no one talked much and no one listened at all. Maybe that’s what she saw in me. I can’t think of any other attractive traits I had back then. At night, after making love, she would settle into the hollow below my collarbone and tell me about herself. Jumping from subject to subject, skipping fifteen years in a breath, she let out everything she’d been saving since childhood. For hours, sometimes all night, I lay beside Julie, feeling her against me and listening.

  A lot of nights I didn’t hear the words so much as the music, the rhythm and melody of her voice as it rose and fell, turned and rose again. I loved her for it.

  That was the way she talked the night we drove drunk the length of Wyoming in our new VW bug. She told me about her first teacher, her father, her lost virginity, her lost kitten, high school in Atlanta and Dallas, a year at SMU, brothers, boyfriends, whores, oyster bars in Mobile. Some of it I had heard before—gay roommates, her crazy aunt. Some of it was new—a sex dream in junior high, a dinner on Padre Island. The bug hummed. The stars leaped. Mountains loomed far to the north, above the desert, and all the while Julie talked.

  I think the Wyoming emptiness made Julie feel lost again, the way she’d felt as a little girl, scared and lonesome. That early summer night, rolling drunk across the sagebrush desert, was the last time Julie ever talked to me about anything that really mattered.

  ***

  I spent two weeks with Julie’s family one Christmas. Her parents were divorced, so I never met her father, but her mother, Eve, was an energetic, critical little woman with a tongue like a needle-point spur. I came from a one-child family. Nothing in my background prepared me for the shock of six kids competing for everything from toothpaste to recognition. They fought a lot. They screamed and slammed doors. Those kids knew each other’s weaknesses and ripped into exposed nerves without mercy.

  At first I thought they hated each other, but later I found them fiercely loyal to the family when outsiders got involved. Christmas Day, I heard Julie call her overweight little brother a fat slob because he wouldn’t get out of bed for breakfast. Later I asked her why one brother was fat and the others skinny like me.

  She lit into me, ending with, “If you ever insult one of my family again, I’ll burn those lousy books you write.”

  Before that, I didn’t know she thought my books were lousy.

  Above all else, Eve hated ugliness and mediocrity. To her, there was no excuse for either. More than once I heard her say any mother who gives birth to an ugly baby should drown it. In her mind, I flunked both tests, so Eve had no use for me at all. She took for granted that I gave Julie drugs because there was no other possible reason why a daughter of hers would live with a scraggly-haired bum with poor posture, and since Julie had a high opinion of her mother’s disdain, it turned into a long two weeks. Mostly, I played solitaire at the kitchen table.

  It was that hatred for weakness and mediocrity that made the family appear so cold. To become good at something, you must be bad at it first. Right? Eve didn’t see it that way. Fear of failure and ridicule made most of the kids never try anything. The others hid their talents. Julie’s oldest brother played baseball. He was good, but he never told his mom he played until the day he signed with the New York Mets. Even then, she made fun of the Mets. Another brother is an artist. He makes a good living, but he has yet to show Eve a single painting for fear she’ll laugh at it. She would, too.

  No wonder Julie opened up like a washed-out dam when I listened to her. She could tell me her secret fears and aspirations without having them flung in her face the next morning in a fight over who drank all the orange juice.

  To this day, she hasn’t told her mother we were married. Julie and I slept together in the room next to Eve’s. She must have heard the springs, but we pretended it was all illegitimate. Better to live with a bum than marry a bore—though sometimes I wonder if maybe I’m not a bum or a bore.

  Lizbeth asked me about it once. “Why do you think Julie wouldn’t tell her mother she was married?” Lizbeth asked.

  I gave my usual “I don’t know.”

  “Was she ashamed of you?”

  “No. No, I’d say she was embarrassed. I was a skinny, dirty-haired dishwasher, and Eve would have been terribly hurt to think her daughter settled for scum.”

  “Who said you were scum?”

  “Julie’s mom. I suppose Julie agreed at the time. Eve’s contempt was pretty forceful. I never saw any of the kids disagree to her face.”

  “Why was Julie embarrassed by you?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes.”

  “She sold herself short on me. It wasn’t just her mom. She never told any of her high-school or old street friends we were married. Julie and I were Mr. and Ms. Palamino in New Orleans, Wyoming, and Idaho, but in Dallas we were ‘traveling together.’”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  “Hell, she denies it to everyone now. Cora Ann met her in the secondhand store once and asked, ‘Aren’t you the girl who used to be married to Kelly Palamino?’ and Julie looked her right in the eye and said, ‘I’ve never been married in my life.’ Cora Ann believed her.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  I stared at the pattern of the rug. “Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t dream the whole thing. Maybe we weren’t married. We never divorced. Maybe I got some bad peyote and hallucinated Father Funk and Victoria, Texas, and the ride to Houston. Maybe Julie and I didn’t weather bust scares and sit up all night with sick cats. I mean, Julie says it never happened, and who am I to disagree? She doesn’t go to a psychiatrist. She’s not crazy. Maybe it didn’t happen.”

  Lizbeth leaned forward. “If it didn’t happen, where were you those six years?”

  “God, I don’t know.”

  ***

  My own mom had an attitude a lot like Eve’s during the long-hair years. She wrote a letter while we were living in New Orleans, before she and Julie ever met.

  She said, “This girl couldn’t be a very nice person or she wouldn’t be seen with anyone who looks like you.”

  ***

  You would think Colette shouting, “Go to hell, Kelly,” and riding into the south would have pretty much bottomed out my day. I could have adopted an at-least-nothing-worse-can-happen-now attitude and relaxed. Humiliation doesn’t work like you would think.

  That night I was walking across the town square, heading for the Cowboy Bar and a drink with Cora Ann, when three kids blocked my path. One had longish red hair, the other two looked like early-sixties redneck
s. All three wore wool caps.

  The redhead demanded, “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine,” I said. “How old are you?”

  “We’re in the sixth grade and we’re going to stomp you,” he said. The other two moved forward.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re twenty-nine.”

  It wasn’t a bad beating, as beatings go. The little redneck on my right swung a hook into my crotch and the others dived high and low—a well-choreographed fight. I wasn’t their first victim.

  I rolled into the fetal position and protected my glasses while they kicked my back with those pointy-toed cowboy boots of theirs. When I didn’t scream or fight back or whatever they wanted, the kids got bored and wandered off to knock down somebody else.

  Over the years, I’ve taken beatings for hair too long, hair too short, talking, not talking, being twenty-nine or just being, and they all end the same—fetal position. That means something about something.

  ***

  I thought if I lay there long enough someone would come by and save me. A few people walked through the square, but they must have mistaken me for a wino or a dead person or something because no one stopped to turn me over.

  The pain was considerable. One of the little punks had landed a solid boot toe to my taped-together rib cage. Breathing was a problem and the high ringing in my head was back. I wondered if there might be a reason why some lives are consistently more bizarre than others. I mean, what are the odds against being sucked by a hitchhiker and beat up by sixth-graders on the same day?

  I drew my knees up under my chest and pushed myself into the crawl position. By holding on to a tree trunk, I managed to raise myself more or less upright. When I bent over to brush the mud off my jeans, blood dribbled from my face. It spattered on the sidewalk in almost the exact spot where Colette had once spit.

  I unbuttoned my shirt, shrugged it off, and draped it over a tree branch. My undershirt took more care on account of the pain when I raised my hands over my head. I hurried as much as possible, considering the situation. June nights are cool in Wyoming. Also, I hate for people to see me without a shirt on. I’m so chest-shy I often wore a pajama top when Julie and I made love. That was another one of her complaints.