by Tim Sandlin
“That don’t make no sense.”
“Just pretend.”
“This is easier for me than Babs,” Lynette said. “I have an imagination.”
“I have an imagination too.”
“No, you don’t.”
Trying to talk to two women at once is exponentially harder than trying to talk to one. The nuances go on forever.
I interrupted. “Now pretend your baby has grown up.”
“How old?” Babs asked.
“Thirty-three.”
“That’s how old Jesus was when he died.”
“Hank Williams was thirty.”
“Your baby is thirty-three.”
They stopped and looked at me funny. “No need to raise your voice,” Babs said.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re pregnant. Not deaf.” I’d heard that before.
“Here’s the question.”
Lynette tipped her boat so the melted chocolate slop ran to one end. “I thought we’d never get round to the question.”
“Should your baby who is thirty-three reveal himself or herself to his or her father?”
Lynette slurped down the goop while Babs screwed her mouth into a thoughtful line. I was charmed by them both.
“That is a question,” Babs said.
Lynette spoke with a chocolate mustache. “I’d want my baby to beat the tar out of B. B. Swain.”
“How about you, Babs?”
“Is your father rich?”
“It’s not for me. It’s an imaginary person.”
That got the girls back into a good mood. Women love to catch a man in a lie.
“Okay, it is me and I don’t know if my father is rich or not. The whole deal is complicated.”
A light came on in Babs’s face. She’d found a way to relate to the problem. “On One Life to Live a boy got hit by a race car and he needed a transfusion and the only person he could get it from was his real daddy.” She turned to Lynette. “Remember?”
“He was a blood type only one in a million people have.”
“Only his mama had never told anyone, not even his real daddy, who he was.”
Lynette jumped in. “So she had to tell and everyone got totally PO’ed and the real daddy’s real wife ran off to France with the man who up till that day thought he was the real daddy.”
“They were having an affair beforehand,” Babs said.
“But the boy died anyway.”
“Does that answer your question?”
“Yes.”
***
The drive home was so loud I had to roll up my windows, but then fumes seeped in from under the Dodge and I rolled them down again. People pointed at me. Children stuck fingers in their ears.
I found Gus in the kitchen, listening to the phone. From her benignly amused expression, I knew who was on the other end.
“Lydia?”
Gus nodded.
“Is she out of jail?”
Gus flared her nostrils, which is a trick I’ve tried and failed to learn for years. “You be nice to your mama.”
“I’m always nice to my mama.”
Lydia doesn’t say hello. Her way of starting a conversation is to dive in like a hawk on roadkill. “They’ll be breaking down the door soon,” she said. “Why aren’t you here to defend your mother’s honor?”
Mother’s honor—the classic oxymoron. “Did you tell me everything you know about my fathers?”
“You’d have been so proud, sugar booger. I stood up for women’s rights and the male-dominated hierarchy capitulated.”
“The TV thing?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“The reason I’m asking about the fathers is Shannon found those photographs you kept hidden in the panty box when I was a kid.”
“Sam, you are not listening. Your mother is on the lam. I expect federal agents will crash through the door at any instant.”
“Hank said they let you out on your own recognizance.”
“That was before they heard about my little social blunder.”
I waited. Lydia’s social blunders range from minor affronts to major felonies, but what they all have in common is sooner or later they cost me money.
“It’s your friend Maurey’s fault. Right from the start I said ‘Do not trust that Maurey Pierce.’ Instability runs in her family.”
“Pot calling the kettle black. What’d Maurey do?”
“She tattletaled.”
“People over twenty-one don’t tattletale. They rat.”
“She ratted. I’m an innocent victim, trying in my own meek way to transform the Earth into a better, more feminine planet.”
I changed the phone to the other ear. “Are you going to tell me what you did that was so innocent?”
“Nothing. I did nothing.”
“Okay, don’t tell me.” Lydia generally won’t release information until someone tells her not to.
“As a joke, I FedEx’ed Rex a poison chew toy.”
“Rex, the dog?”
“Hank told Maurey and Maurey called the Secret Service.”
I considered the implications—cost times bother times time, “How do you poison a chew toy?”
“Soak it in Raid for two days, then sprinkle on some crushed d-Con.”
What could I say? My mother thinks she can improve the world by assassinating famous dogs. “This is all very interesting, Lydia, but about my fathers.”
“Forget the phantom fathers, your actual mother needs sympathy. Now.”
“Remember when you drove Maurey and me up from Rock Springs after she almost aborted Shannon, you told us this story where Caspar was supposed to come home Christmas Eve, only he didn’t, so you invited some boys over for a party and they got drunk and raped you over and over and urinated on you and that’s how I was conceived.”
There was a long silence, which is weird for Lydia. Lydia abhors silence. “What’s the point?” she said.
“What I want to know is, did you know the names of the boys who raped you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You told us one was the brother of a school friend,” I said, “so you must have known their names.”
“God, Sam, it happened over thirty years ago. How am I supposed to remember the names of stoolheads I only met once thirty years ago.”
“Those stoolheads are my father. At least, one of them is. I’d think if a boy rapes you and makes you pregnant, his name would stick out in your memory.”
Another silence, followed by an impatient exhalation. “Mimi’s brother had a silly frat boy kind of name—Sport or Slick, something like that.”
“Skip?”
“That’s him.”
“You told me Mimi’s last name was Rotkeillor, but the Skip on Shannon’s list is Prescott.”
“What are you, Perry Mason? Maybe I mixed up my Mimis. All I remember is he had a syringe he used to shoot vodka into oranges.”
“Was another one named William?”
“Why, at your age, are you suddenly obsessed by sperm donors?”
“Shannon looked through old yearbooks and came up with five names and I need to be certain they’re correct.”
“Why for God’s sake?”
I had no answer. “Why didn’t you tell me my fathers’ names?”
She made a bitter laugh sound. “Hell, Sam, you never asked.”
Good point. “I’m asking now.”
“There was a Billy. And Jake. A big kid named something like Bubba.”
“Babe?”
“That’s it.”
“How about Cameron?”
“Maybe.”
“I have to be sure.”
“One of them was named Cameron.” She paused. “Sam,
what difference can it possibly make now?”
It’s my theory that most humans only make two or three decisions in a lifetime. The rest is random luck. At that moment, I made a decision.
“Lydia,” I said, “it’s time I met Dad.”
5
Saturday morning I fell into a clitoral fantasy at Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. Over cheese blintzes I discovered Linda Ronstadt sitting next to me while my hand under the table dipped into her silken panties. As I rubbed lightly, side to side across the top, Linda lifted a section of orange to her mouth and with dainty teeth bit off the very tip. Drops of orange juice sprayed across the fine fuzz on her upper lip. A low, Spanish moan rose from her breasts. I went into my world-renowned fingertip figure-eight maneuver.
“More coffee?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring your check.” I hate reality. There’s nothing so deflating as a waitress pulling the plug on a daydream. It’s almost worse than not finishing the real thing.
Linda Ronstadt has been a regular part of my erotic imagery for almost twenty years, and she only grows sweeter as the time passes. I take pride in my loyalty toward dream lovers. No jumping from rock star to movie star to cover girl for me. What I do is find an unknown, a starlet on the brink of fame, so I can be the first before every college kid with five fingers and a jar of Vaseline claims a piece of the action. This might be another revolt against my gang-bang heritage.
After the waitress cleared breakfast, I spread a street map of Greensboro on the table and drew five Magic Marker stars on the addresses of the five fathers. High school sports heroes, as a rule, don’t wander. It’s the big fish–little pond syndrome; once you get used to being treated like you matter, it’s hard to uproot and move somewhere where you don’t.
After I added one more star for my own Manor House, the pattern on the map was not unlike the six stars on the front of a Subaru. Skip Prescott and Cameron Saunders lived next door to each other in the Starmount Forest development, which surrounded the Starmount Country Club—home of the Bull Run model golf cart—and meant big money.
William Gaines was just off the west edge of Starmount Forest, not three blocks from Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. It was a sharp edge, cash wise, but still respectable enough to mean his life hadn’t been a bust. Babe Carnisek lived south of downtown. Men in his neighborhood drove American pickup trucks sporting South-Shall-Rise-Again bumper stickers and worked by the hour for people they didn’t like. A number of my golf cart welders came from West 23rd.
Jake Williams’s star sat dead center of a black neighborhood I’d never actually driven through, although not so much because it had a reputation as dangerous. The area just hadn’t come up.
Time to move. I wished I could arrive in my 240Z, or at least a Dodge Dart with a muffler, but some days you’ve got to take action now, to hell with the conditions. You wait for conditions to be right and nobody’d ever do anything. Twenty years after first hearing of my fathers, I was finally going to meet them. As Shannon said—more than once—the night before, it was about damn time.
***
A man with glasses was kneeling in a garden in the side yard of 147 North Glenwood. The man didn’t look like a rapist. Rapists don’t garden. The house was one of those two-story red brick jobs that sprang up like hives across the South after World War II. A screened-in porch ran the width of the front, through which I could make out a figure at a table.
As I climbed out of the Dart, the man in the garden looked over and waved. I waved back and walked up the crushed rock walkway to the front door. The whole scene felt domestic, as regular as hell. When I knocked on the screen door, a tenor voice barked. “What?”
Inside the porch, a teenage boy sat at a card table, writing furiously in a store-bought journal. As I slid through the door, his face kind of jumped out. He stared at me with anger and said, “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”
I said, “Walt Whitman.”
He said, “Nine out of ten men are suicides.”
I said, “Benjamin Franklin—Poor Richard’s Almanac. You’re going to have to do better than that to beat me at death quotes. When I was your age, I knew them all by heart.”
The boy was dressed in black. He stared at me with what I took as a tragic sneer. His neck had the rose speckle of recently cleared-up acne.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get over it.”
“Are you here to fix the freezer?”
I tried reading his journal upside down, but all I made out was his name—Clark Gaines—in the top left corner and the word PUTRID, underlined three times.
The boy’s forehead puckered into a series of folds. “I’m dying. Did you know I’m dying?”
“I hope it’s nothing genetic.”
Obviously not the response he’d hoped for. “Genetic?”
“Inherited. I hope you didn’t inherit whatever you’re dying from.”
“What difference does it make what anyone dies from? I’m dying, you’re dying, the whole planet is rotting like a dead cat’s eyes gorged with tiny white worms.”
I saw the picture. “Then you’re dying as in ‘We are all dying every day.’ You’re not dying as in knowing when or how.”
“Do you realize all the humans on Earth are loose excrement, including you?”
There’s nothing sadder than a Southern male poet. “This is a stage, Clark. Someday you’ll grow out of it and look back and gag that you were ever like this.”
“Who are you to say I’ll outgrow death?”
Who indeed? But I considered myself an adult, and one of the duties of an adult is to tell the young that when they grow up they won’t be miserable anymore.
Time to bring the conversation back to my mission. “William Gaines?”
The boy nodded toward the man in the side yard. “Saint Billy is tending his garden.”
“Why is he Saint Billy?”
“Old Billy Butch believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. Religion to him is garden tomatoes and calling his mother Miss Ellie. The sap would be hilarious if he wasn’t my father. Have you read Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre?”
“When I was considerably younger than you are now.”
The kid seemed surprised. “Then why haven’t you experienced suicide?”
“Sartre didn’t know his ass from an avocado.”
Clark’s forehead rippled like he expected me to hit him. Or wanted me to. I swear, tears appeared in his pained eyes. I decided it was time to talk to Saint Billy.
***
He had a face like Dennis the Menace’s father—the TV show, not the funny papers. He wore cotton gloves and sturdy shoes that L. L. Bean makes especially for people who work in dirt. As I approached, he stood up with a small spade in his right hand.
“Thank God,” he said.
“Why?”
“You’re here for the freezer.”
I didn’t say anything. There’s an awkwardness to telling a man he may or may not be your father. What if he tried to hug me?
Billy said, “Come on, then,” and, pulling his gloves off as he walked, he led me around the house. I watched him for signs of me. He was thin, like I am, but also tall, wore glasses, and had straight hair—no matches. Billy probably wasn’t the one, and, if so, did I have the right to bring back an act of violence from years ago? Maybe I should fix his freezer and go home.
“Two days ago when Daphne opened the lid, it made a whistle sound and the motor quit,” he said. “We’ve kept it closed since, but goods are beginning to thaw.”
We stepped into the back utility room, which held wasp repellent, used flower pots, a washer and dryer, and a chest-type freezer, what grocers call a coffin case. Billy stood looking at the freezer as if something might happen, then, after a short pause, he opened the top and a wave of warm air drifted into my
face. Fish—the warm air carried fish and a hint of spoiled milk. In the freezer, rows of butcher-papered and neatly labeled foods leaked on each other.
“I did not come to fix your freezer.”
He looked up from his soft fish. “I’m losing a lot of meat here.”
“Do you remember a girl named Lydia Callahan? You knew her in high school.”
He folded his gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket. “No, I don’t recall a Lydia Callahan.”
I counted to three and jumped in. “Lydia is my mother. She says you and four other boys had group sex with her on Christmas Eve 1949.” I couldn’t bring myself to say rape. “I was born nine months later, so there’s a five-to-one chance you fathered me.”
Silence. Billy’s facial color dropped a shade, but other than that I saw no physical reaction. He blinked a couple of times, watching me.
“That night was an unfortunate mistake,” he said.
“For everyone but me.”
Billy took off his glasses and looked down at them in his hands. “I shouldn’t have been there.”
Sometimes it’s best to shut up. Billy seemed lost in memory, not really seeing me or the open freezer or anything. I suppose he was reliving the ugliness, wishing he could change the past. I suppose.
“Have you told the others yet?” Billy asked.
The door to the house was open and I couldn’t help but wonder if Clark had slipped in to listen. “You’re the first.”
“Mr. Prescott isn’t going to like this.”
“Skip Prescott?”
He nodded. “He owns Dixieland Sporting Goods. I’m in charge of footwear.”
“Why should Skip Prescott not like this any more than the rest of you?”
Billy turned to face outdoors. It was a nice backyard—magnolia tree, wicker swing, brick barbecue. He took good care of his stuff.
“What do you expect me to do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. How do you feel?”
“How am I supposed to feel?”
“A possible son has appeared from nowhere. That should make you feel something.”
He blinked twice more. “I already have a son.”
“I met him. He seems interesting.”
“Clark is a sensitive boy.” He let it go at that. “What’s your name?”