Sex and Sunsets: A Novel

by Tim Sandlin

  “Of course not, Mama.”

  “We heard you had a prescription for dope.”

  “Who told you that? Did Julie tell you I’m on drugs?”

  “You were a fool to lose her, Kelly. No other woman is ever going to take care of you the way she did.”

  I guess I exploded. “I didn’t lose Julie. She left. And she lies, Mom. I’m not on drugs. I’m not crazy. Everything she tells you about me is lies.”

  “Why would Julie lie? Her only concern is your welfare.”

  “She hates me.”

  “Don’t shout at your mother.”

  “I’m sorry.” I haven’t had a conversation with Mom in over twenty years in which I didn’t apologize at least once. “She hates me,” I repeated.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mom answered. “You shouldn’t take the split-up so personally. Julie told me all the details. She was just creatively stifled, that’s all. I’ve been creatively stifled and I know how she feels. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “My wife’s leaving had nothing to do with me?”

  “Yes, and if you’d quit moping around and feeling sorry for yourself and cut your hair and dress decently, you could land yourself a real job, using your degree.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “I only tell you these things because I love you, Kelly.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “It breaks my heart to have a son who’s a failure. You’re almost thirty years old. It’s time to grow up.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Our conversations always end with me automatically saying “Yes, Mama,” until she winds down and tells me not to call collect in the daytime, wait until after five, then hangs up.

  Afterward, I stood in the booth a long time trying to think of someplace I could go other than Idaho.

  ***

  The appointment with Lizbeth was set for one-thirty, and it wasn’t quite noon, so I figured I’d wander home and take a shower with the last of the hot water. Later I could find Cora Ann and work out a bathroom-and-kitchen-privileges deal while my utilities were off. There would be a heat problem next winter, but that was months away. I had to get through Wednesday first.

  I found Alice sitting on the front porch, watching the landlord change my lock. Mr. Hiatt, the landlord, is shaped like an upright freezer. He always chews on unlit cigars and says “fucking” before nouns.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Alice said Miaou.

  Mr. Hiatt said, “Fucking lock won’t come out.” He was kneeling on the porch, blocking the door, fiddling with a Phillips head screwdriver.

  “I haven’t used it in three years,” I said. “Why do you want it out?”

  “Got to change the fucking lock. You’re moving.” The screwdriver slipped and skidded across the door. A hailstorm of curses spewed from Mr. Hiatt’s mouth.

  “I can’t move,” I said. “All my stuff is here.”

  “Anything left in this apartment tomorrow goes to the dump.” Mr. Hiatt turned the screwdriver over and began beating on the keyhole with the blunt end.

  I sat down, facing the church across the street. For four years I had been sitting on the porch with Alice, watching the sky and the trees change. It seemed hard to believe I couldn’t do it anymore.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Orders. You have a key for this place?”

  “A dog swallowed it.” I rubbed Alice’s forehead. For once, she acted like she enjoyed my attention. I was so used to my apartment, my plants and pictures, the holes in the walls, faucets that wouldn’t turn off, windows that leaked. My bed.

  “Why did he have the utilities turned off if he meant to have me thrown out anyway?”

  “Damned if I know.” Mr. Hiatt drew back his fist and punched the lock clear through the door and onto the floor inside. “Got the sucker,” he snorted. “I put the rest of June’s rent and your deposit on the trunk in the goddamn living room. Don’t spread it around that I gave back your fucking deposit money. John wouldn’t like that.”

  “Why did you then?”

  Mr. Hiatt took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at me for the first time. “You’re a damn nice kid, Kelly. I hate to see you in trouble. Maybe you can use the fucking money to set yourself up in a new town.”

  “I’m not leaving the old town.”

  8

  I drove to the Mental Health Center and sat in the lobby for over an hour, reading pamphlets with titles like What is Depression?, Alcoholism, The Shame of the Battered Woman, and How to Tell If Your Child Is on Drugs. Those brochures are like the Reader’s Digest articles on swollen livers and colon cancer. I can’t read the symptoms without noticing a few in me.

  Sitting on the couch, I tried to remember what life was like before the day of Colette’s wedding. I know I drank, danced, washed dishes, chased waitresses. I talked to Cora Ann and Lizbeth. I listened to music, looked forward to Doonesbury, ate hamburgers plain with ketchup, but I couldn’t remember how I felt—what it was like to wake up in the morning. What I thought about whenever I was alone for a moment.

  Colette had become everything. The first thought in the morning to the dreams at night. I couldn’t conceive of what I’d been before her. Or what I might be after her.

  I mentioned this midway through the session with Lizbeth. “I’m unbelievably happy when I’m with her and miserable when I’m not with her.”

  Lizbeth sat less than four feet away, looking at my face. She wore green. She had cut her hair a new way, which threw me off a little. Psychiatrists and mountains aren’t supposed to change. Too many people depend on them.

  “What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “Means I should be with her all the time.”

  “You shouldn’t base your happiness on something outside yourself.”

  “Why not?” After a couple of years of therapy, I’d learned what not to say to Lizbeth. I don’t know if those exasperated “grow up” looks were real or imagined, but I imagined she was giving me one then. I kept my eyes on the floor.

  Lizbeth went into the speech we’d both heard so often: “If your happiness is based on something external, you can lose it, or you can become so afraid you might lose it that you aren’t happy anymore.”

  I wanted to lie down real bad. Emotion wears me out. “What if your outside base is stable?” I asked.

  “Is Colette stable?”

  I thought about her eyes and hair and the way she walked. “She’s not consistent, but if she loved me and lived with me, I think she’d stay—a while.”

  I could see Lizbeth’s hands. The right index finger moved up, then down, then out. Maybe she did isometrics to stay in shape while sitting all day listening to crazies whine over the same things hour after hour.

  Lizbeth tried a different angle. “Have you slept with Colette yet?”

  “Of course not. She’s married.”

  “So?”

  “It’s unethical to sleep with a married woman.”

  “Is it ethical to steal a married woman from her husband?”

  “If it’s for her own good.”

  “You’re doing this for Colette’s good then?”

  “She needs me.”

  “It’s right to convince Colette to leave Danny, but not right to sleep with her.”

  “Not while she’s living with him. Listen, could I lay on the carpet? I’m tired. My mind feels too fuzzy to hold me up.”

  Lizbeth looked at me a moment. “Go ahead.”

  I slid off the chair and onto the floor. Lying on my back, looking at the spackle bumps in the ceiling, I tried to remember if I’d slept last night. I must have, but I couldn’t remember. I felt real sleepy.

  “What’s going to happen in your life?” Lizbeth asked.

  “I’ll marry Colette and write novels that change peop
le for the better and raise babies into good grownups.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to?”

  “She wants to.”

  “What if she doesn’t?”

  “I’ll either go crazy or I won’t.” The floor felt comfortable, warm, like an electric blanket. It had been too long a day. I talked on, more to myself than Lizbeth.

  “My life is this bouncing ball, see. Every bounce it flies higher and comes down harder. It’s only a matter of time before I come down too hard and shatter—or bounce so high I lose touch with earth forever.”

  “Cute metaphor.”

  I couldn’t tell if Lizbeth was being sarcastic, but nobody likes a snotty shrink, so I went on. “The drama of me is this. Can I hold my brain and body together long enough to write a good book, find a good woman, accomplish something that makes this manic bullshit worth the trouble?”

  I leaned back and looked at Lizbeth’s ankles, expecting a reaction to my wise words. They didn’t move.

  Her voice came from above. “Would writing a book or finding a woman get you off the bouncing ball?”

  I thought awhile. “No. I’d still go way up and come way down at pretty much predictable intervals, but maybe the bottom wouldn’t be such a shock, and a steady woman might keep me in touch with reality or whatever.”

  I lay flat, thinking and drifting, exhausted. After a minute, Lizbeth spoke: “You talk about women as though they’re tools of the trade equal to typewriters and paper. Do you want Colette or do you want to use her to write books?”

  “What?”

  “The end, the goal. Do you want her or what she brings?”

  “Given a choice, I’d prefer to be happy.”

  I knew Lizbeth didn’t take that as a satisfactory answer, but she didn’t press it. I pretended someone had set a great weight on my forehead, at least forty pounds. A giant thumb was squishing out my third eye. It felt good.

  “What are you going to do?” Lizbeth asked.

  “Right now?”

  “The next two hours, the next two days. Colette won’t see you anymore. John has made it pretty much impossible for you to stay in Jackson. Are you going to leave?”

  I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to crawl under Lizbeth’s desk and go to sleep. “I wouldn’t stand a chance right now, away from the familiar.”

  “How will you live?”

  “It won’t be hard. John doesn’t know he’s dealing with an old-line hippie. I’m highly trained in surviving without an income or a place to live. So long as I’ve got the bug I’m in fine shape.”

  Lizbeth didn’t comment.

  ***

  Flashing lights pulled me over less than a block from the Mental Health Center. It was the young deputy with the sideburns who had pushed in the Out door and served the peace warrant three weeks earlier. I slid from the bug and walked toward the deputy sheriff’s car where he waited, tall and smiling. Every policeman’s smile I’ve ever seen meant I was in big trouble.

  The deputy peeled off his sunglasses. “Most people drive on the right side of the road.”

  I looked back at the VW, which was parked against the left curb. “Which side was I on?”

  “The wrong side.” He stood watching me. He seemed to expect some kind of an explanation.

  “I have a lot on my mind today,” I said. “Guess I forgot about right and wrong sides of the road. Are you going to give me a ticket?”

  “Nope. We’ll forget about it this time.” The deputy leaned against his car door and crossed both arms. He was enjoying himself. “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he said.

  “A proposition.”

  “Yep. An either/or-type deal you can’t turn down.”

  I put my left hand on the hood and looked through the windshield at the rifle on the gun rack next to the driver’s seat. “So what is it?”

  The deputy was in no hurry. “We’ve got a file of parking tickets on this vehicle from three, four years ago,” he said, nodding at the bug. “What with interest and all, we figure you owe the city at least a couple of thousand dollars.”

  “Two thousand dollars for parking tickets?”

  “That’s right. Now, legally, I should impound that automobile right now, but you’re a good kid with a clean nose. We thought we’d give you a break.”

  It grates my nerves to be called a kid by someone younger than me. “I could use a break,” I said.

  “The city is willing to forget all those fines and interest if you will hop in your car and follow me to the county line, where I’ll stop and you won’t.”

  I looked at the bug. It was off-white with a dent in the passenger door. The trunk lid and hood were held on by bungee cords. Because of a small fire, it didn’t have a backseat. “What will I use for gas money?”

  The deputy reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. “Since this is the county that cares, I have been authorized to give you one hundred dollars for traveling expenses. That ought to get you clear of Wyoming and then some.”

  Mr. Hiatt’s rent and deposit money was stuffed in my back pocket. Combined with the hundred and my last paycheck, I could go pretty far—or double back and set myself up again.

  “Is there any legal basis for this deal?” I asked.

  “If you can afford a lawyer, and if you can find one that will take the case, I’m sure we could come up with something,” he said. “Do you have a job or residence?”

  “No.”

  “That’s vagrancy right there.” The deputy stared off at the aspen on the hill over town. “Look, Kelly. I know something about your problem with John Hart. You’re holding the raw end of the stick, but there’s nothing I can do. If I didn’t like you, you’d be handcuffed and fingerprinted by now, so don’t push your luck. Take the offer and get out. No woman is worth prison, and I promise you that’s the next step.”

  “What about my cat?”

  “What cat?”

  “I can’t leave Alice.”

  He held out the hundred dollars. “Take the money, Kelly. Get in your car and follow me. If you don’t, I’ll have to do my duty and impound the automobile.”

  I’ve noticed that people tend to personify Volkswagen bugs more than any other car. I wonder why that is. The bug and I had been friends for a long time. I’d miss her.

  “I wouldn’t want to stop you from doing your duty,” I said. “The keys are in it.”

  The deputy put his sunglasses back on. “Are you this much in love, or just a stubborn jackass?”

  “Both.”

  ***

  As I walked home, for some reason I got to thinking about my mother. It seemed like a long time since we’d talked, so I stopped in a phone booth across from the post office and called Idaho.

  I called collect. Mom answered.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “Kelly? Is that you?” Her voice sounded kind of worried.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Why are you calling? Is everything okay?”

  “Sure, Mom, everything’s fine. I just hadn’t heard from you in a while and figured I’d call.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. When she did speak, she sounded disgusted. “Kelly, you’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Behaving like a fool.”

  “What’d I do?”

  “You called less than two hours ago.”

  “I did?”

  “Julie’s right. You are on drugs, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not on drugs.”

  “How could you forget calling if you aren’t on drugs?”

  Fair question. “I called you two hours ago?”

  “Right.”

  I stood in the phone booth, watching the American flag in front of the post office. There didn’t seem to b
e anything to say. “What did we talk about?”

  “Kelly,” Mom said, “don’t be such a fuckup.”

  ***

  That was the second time I had heard Mom say fuck. The first was at Grandpa Hawken’s deathbed. On July 4 of the Bicentennial summer of 1976, a dirtbiker from Salt Lake City ran over Grandpa Hawken on a trail up on Bull’s Head Mountain.

  The bike mangled Grandpa’s insides. It split his spleen, ruptured a kidney, poked a rib through a lung. The Teewinot County sheriff’s department carried the old man off the mountain and rushed him to the hospital in Rexburg, where we all gathered to see Grandpa once more before the doctors performed a last-gasp operation that no one expected him to survive.

  We stood in a horseshoe around the bed, Julie, me, Mom, Dad, and Aunt Vera and her husband, Tom. Mom and Vera tried to convince Grandpa that he wasn’t dying, but he knew better. He lay there breathing through his mouth, an ancient head on top of a midget wrestler’s body. His arms were over the sheets, not moving. He stared at Julie, thinking of Grandma I suppose.

  Grandpa’s mouth moved up and back down like he was chewing. “Get some paper,” he said.

  Aunt Vera said, “What for? What’s he want paper for?”

  Julie went to the nurses’ station and borrowed a pad and a pen. She came back and stood by Grandpa’s right ear. Mom stood on the other side. I was next to Julie where I could see his darting eyes.

  Grandpa looked at Julie. “I’ve got some last words.”

  Mom mumbled, “Oh, Daddy. You’re not going to die.”

  “Shuddup, Mavine,” Grandpa Hawken said without moving his eyes from Julie’s face. They were green eyes—bright green.

  “It’s a poem,” he said. “The first poem my mama taught me. My mama was beautiful.”

  Julie nodded. She stood straight, not bending toward Grandpa at all, with the pad in front of her. She looked ready to take a business letter.

  Grandpa Hawken’s eyes fluttered a moment, as if searching his memory for the proper words. He licked his lower lip and began in a sea-chant rhythm:

  Tiddlywinks young man