by Tim Sandlin
Maurey came through the door. She felt my forehead and took off my shoes. “You look like a wreck,” she said.
“I am a wreck.”
“You’re in the right place, I’m a tow truck.”
I closed my eyes, too tired for metaphors.
***
Every now and then I got up to pee, which meant going outside in the snow and around the building. Twice each day a pregnant teenager who told me her name was Toinette brought food. You can take it as a gauge of how far into my hole I’d sunk that I felt no curiosity as to how and when Toinette became pregnant.
On the third day, Maurey showed up at my bedside, straddling a chair backward, like a cowboy.
She said, “My brother is dying, his lover is losing a lover. I’ve got a pregnant girl disowned by her family and a little boy so traumatized he can’t speak.”
I pulled the sheet over my mouth; she reached across and yanked it back down.
“And you,” she said, “are the only person on the ranch who feels sorry for yourself.”
“Auburn can’t talk?”
“Auburn’s fine.” She knocked wood on the chair. “Roger can’t talk.”
“Who’s Roger?”
“Long story. Are you going to get up or waste away?”
“What about the recovering junkie?” I asked.
“What?”
“When we talked on the phone you had a recovering junkie.”
“He stopped recovering and left.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Win some, lose some. The deal is, you’re the lone refugee out here not pulling your weight in the cheerfulness department.”
“Are you cheerful?” She looked worn out. The veins showed in her arms and her eyes crinkled like she’d been outside too much without sunglasses.
“Fuck, no, I’m not cheerful. Helping family die is hard work, but I’m faking it like a champ, and I can’t do this unless you fake it too.”
I sat up. “You want me to fake being cheerful?”
Maurey’s blue eyes glistened, but she didn’t cry. “I need you, Sam. You’ve got to get up and help me.”
So I did. All I needed was someone to need me.
***
Mornings, Maurey drove or snowmobiled the boys six miles down to their bus stop while Hank hitched a team of half-breed draft horses to the hay sled, which he skidded around the pasture with Pud and me on back, throwing hay to a herd of forty horses and a half dozen semi-tame elk. I couldn’t help but wonder what Gaylene and Shirley would say if they saw me feeding horses with horses. The TM Ranch was a long way from Callahan Golf Carts, in more than distance.
After feeding, I went back to bed with a carafe of coffee and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Emma Bovary was the sort of woman I once would have found ripe for adultery—bored silly. So desperate for attention that she’ll risk all for one interesting night. I have now sworn off the Emma Bovarys of the world.
I generally took a short nap after lunch, then strapped on the cross-country skis and shuffled up Miner Creek to the warm springs and back. This time segment was set aside for self-flagellation. Going up the hill I pined for Gilia, at the warm springs itself I dwelt on my shameful conduct toward Clark and Atalanta, and coming down I mourned my wasted talent as a novelist—the theory being the best way of coming to terms with guilt is to wallow in it.
Maurey gave me a choice between cooking supper and the daily cleaning of the stud stall. Food won’t stomp you to death, so I chose supper. Cooking can be quite pleasant when it’s cold outside and you’re in a warm place that smells good. As I chopped and blended, Toinette sat in the family room or den or whatever it was called and played her viola. She warmed up with scales and finger exercises, then she practiced Irish Rhapsody by Victor Herbert—“We Roam Through the World” and “My Lodgings on the Cold Ground.” The viola parts weren’t something you’d whistle along with, but they made the day nicer.
Toinette had come from Belgium to Jackson Hole to play in our summer symphony. Under the full moon in the Tetons, she surrendered to love—Maurey suspects a percussionist—and a child was conceived. I can relate to that. When Toinette telephoned Papa he called her a whore in Flemish, French, and English and told her not to come home. He said, From this day forward my daughter is dead. The jerk.
Dinner was a sitcom written by Edgar Allan Poe.
Afterward, Pud and the boys cleaned up. I carried my decaf into the family room and looked through catalogs or read Zane Grey by the wood-burning heater while Chet and Pete played Scrabble and Toinette watched French-language TV off the Canadian satellite. Some nights, during old movies, I watched with her. The strange language wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as seeing Jimmy Stewart open his mouth and speak in a totally non-Jimmy Stewart voice.
By ten-thirty I was back in bed with Madame Bovary.
***
The third day after I got out of bed, I came in from my afternoon ski and guilt orgy to find Maurey in the kitchen, aiming a hypodermic syringe at the ceiling. Pete sat on a stool beside the wood-block table, playing gin rummy with Chet. I checked out the score; Pete was way ahead.
“Where’d you learn to give shots?” I asked Maurey.
She tapped the syringe barrel with her index fingernail. “You’d be amazed how many doctors are alcoholic.”
“I doubt it.”
“They come here to start recovery and I make them teach me things. Who you think will deliver Toinette’s baby if it comes during a blizzard?”
I opened the refrigerator to pull out a bottle of cranberry juice and perused the options for supper—leftover corned beef and applesauce.
Pete said, “Gin.”
Chet said, “Hell.” He gathered in the loose cards and shuffled. Chet was an adept card shuffler, which is a skill I’ve never been able to pick up. My shuffles tend to explode across the table.
“Roll up your sleeve,” Maurey said to Pete.
As Pete rolled his sleeve up over his mop-handle-thin arm, he turned on the stool to face me. “Maurey says you’re paying my doctor bills.”
I shrugged and drank juice straight from the bottle. It embarrasses me when people act like I’m being generous for giving away bits of the Callahan family fortune. I never did anything to deserve it, except being born.
“Thank you,” Pete said.
“We’re family,” I said. “Family sticks together.”
Pete continued staring at me, like he used to when he was ten and wanted to drive me crazy. I tried to look back at him, but it was difficult. He breathed with his mouth open and his gums were swollen to the point of cracking. His skin was a translucent yellow green, like zucchini pulp, and he’d lost so much weight the bones around his temples stood out from his face.
Chet slapped the deck on the table. “Cut.”
Pete said, “Sam, you and I have never liked each other.” It was a quiet statement of fact, not an accusation.
I said, “You were God’s own brat as a child, but since you turned fifteen or so, I’ve liked you.”
Maurey swabbed Pete’s upper arm with rubbing alcohol. The smell filled the room.
“But I haven’t liked you,” Pete said.
“That’s too bad. Why not?”
“To start with, you’re homophobic.”
“I like gay guys as much as the other kind.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Maurey said.
“What else?” I asked.
“Your mother was a snob to my mother.”
“My mother is a snob to everyone—even me. Especially me. It’s not fair to turn on a person because they have snotty parents. What else?”
He blinked twice, thinking. “You knocked up my sister when she was thirteen.”
I held up one hand like a cop stopping traffic. “She made me do it. Have you ever tried
saying no to Maurey?”
Maurey pinched loose skin on Pete’s upper arm. “He’s right, Pete. I seduced him. Poor little Sam didn’t know the first thing about sex.”
“That’s not exactly true,” I said.
“You thought you could make a girl pregnant with a French kiss.”
No one ever got anywhere correcting Maurey’s view of history, so I went back to Pete. “There’s enough people in the world with good reason to dislike me, Pete, but you’re not one of them. I’d be real happy if I could call myself your friend.”
He smiled, showing much more of his swollen, bleeding gums. “Okay,” he said, “let’s kiss and make up.”
My face must have shown terror because Chet and Maurey went into hoots of glee. Even Pete laughed. I don’t mind being the butt of a joke if it relieves tension.
“Instead of kissing, how about if I deal you in,” Chet said.
“Great.”
But it never happened. As Chet dealt, Maurey sank the needle into what was left of Pete’s muscle. He picked up his cards and studied them a moment, then his eyes turned dull, his chin dropped to his chest, and the cards in his hand fluttered to the floor. Gently Chet helped Pete walk into the bedroom.
***
Over the weeks, I got to know Chet fairly well. While Pete rested in the afternoons, Chet would come into the kitchen, sit at the block table, and smoke cigarettes while I cooked. Chet was tall with reddish blond hair. You could tell from how he smiled sometimes that he was basically a pretty happy person, or would have been if his partner hadn’t got sick. He and Pete had met working lights at some theater in New York, Off Broadway, and Chet liked to talk about plays and who was hot and who was gliding on their past glory. He gave me the scoop on which actors were gay. A couple amazed me.
The only visible difference between Chet and the hetero males on the ranch was Chet tucked in his shirttail.
Hank and Maurey both hassled me for refusing to see Lydia.
“She’s your mother,” Maurey said.
“I’ve heard her deny that, many a time.”
“She was young then. Now, she’ll admit she has a child to almost anyone.”
“She ruined my life.”
“Everybody’s mother ruins their life. That doesn’t mean you can blow her off.”
“Watch me.”
Hank said Lydia wanted to apologize and reconcile our differences.
“Did she say that?”
“Not in words, but I know your mother. She never says what she feels in words.”
“You mean she lies.”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Lydia doesn’t lie, exactly. She expects you to see behind what she says.”
***
A letter came from Gilia.
Sam Callahan,
You did a rotten thing. It hurt. I don’t know which is worse, screwing Mrs. Prescott or running away. You could have at least given me the satisfaction of telling you to go to hell.
Dad gave me a set of the photographs of you and Katrina. I told him he is as despicable as you are, which is a lot. I haven’t had much luck with men in my life.
Speaking of Katrina, she and Skip are now the lovey-dovey couple of the South. They neck in public. She compares their love to that of Prince Charles and Lady Di. Yesterday, I heard Katrina telling a table full of trust fund widows at the club that you date-raped her. It made me so mad, I walked over and threw the photo of you and her on the table—you know the one where you have a pom-pom on your penis and she has you tied to the wall. I said, “Does that look like date rape?”
Sam, you’re the only person who ever let me act like myself. I wish you hadn’t turned out to be such a dip-shit.
Sincerely,
Gilia
Paper-clipped to the letter was the Greensboro Record “Births and Deaths” column from November 1, 1983. Midway down the births, Gilia had highlighted in yellow Magic Marker:
Sam Lynn Paseneaux, a boy, 8 lbs., 1 oz., born to Babs
Paseneaux and Sam Callahan.
Sammi Babs Norloff, a girl, 6 lbs., 5 oz., born to Lynette
Norloff and Sam Callahan.
In the margin, she had drawn a yellow exclamation point followed by a question mark—!?
***
I had no contact with Callahan Magic Golf Carts. They didn’t need me. I called my lawyer to set up rent payments for Babs and Lynette and to get started hurling counter injunctions at Wanda.
“I’ll pay ten thousand dollars to make certain she doesn’t get a penny.”
“We can do that,” my lawyer said.
Maurey overheard the conversation. Her comment was “Getting vindictive in our old age, aren’t we?”
“I’m a man of principles.”
“That’s the nice word for it.”
My only other conversation with anyone in North Carolina came after Thanksgiving dinner, when Shannon telephoned.
She asked, “Are you well yet?”
“No.”
“Are you better?”
“I don’t think in qualitative terms.”
“Wanda tried to move in the other day.”
“Good Lord.”
“She brought two guys with tattoos and a pickup truck full of stuff. Gus blocked the door and wouldn’t let them in.”
“How’d Wanda handle it?”
“She cussed worse than I ever heard anyone cuss. She waved a tire iron in Gus’s face and screamed, ‘Nigger!’ Then she ordered the two guys to beat her up.”
“Two guys with tattoos are no match for Gus.”
“I sure am glad I never called Wanda Mama.”
I looked over at Maurey, who was making cowboy cappuccino. She would enjoy this story. “What’d you and Eugene do?”
“I ran around and locked the other doors and windows. Eugene took notes. He wants to write his thesis on my family.”
We chitchatted a few minutes, or Shannon chitchatted while I counted the number of holes in Maurey’s phone mouthpiece—eighteen.
Shannon said, “Gilia and her parents aren’t speaking to each other, so she spends the night here sometimes. We have a lot in common.”
There was a long silence while I searched for a detail to study.
“Gilia Saunders,” she said.
I guess she wanted a comment. I couldn’t even breathe, much less comment.
“She and I are going to New York City over Spring Break. She wants to take me shopping and to art galleries and all that stuff you never would do with me.”
I stared at the turkey remains on the table. Hank had gone to town to be with Lydia, and Pete only ate some dressing and gravy before lying down, but the six of us who remained had pretty much left the carcass in tatters.
I said, “That’s nice of Gilia.”
“We drove down to see Clark Gaines. He’s back home now. He said to say ‘hello.’”
“I have to hang up now.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“Thank you.”
***
Dear Babs and Lynette,
Enclosed you will find two envelopes addressed to Gilia Saunders of 16 Corner Creek Drive in Greensboro. Would each of you mind dropping her a note explaining my relationship to Sam and Sammi and why my name is on the birth certificates instead of the real fathers?
This favor will save me from much groveling.
Yours,
Sam Callahan
***
Dear Gilia,
I’m surprised to hear that you don’t know which is worse—what I did with Katrina Prescott or running away afterward. I ran because I had hurt you, I had confirmed all your worst opinions of men, and I didn’t think you wanted to hear my excuses. Not that there are any. I told myself someday I would make a commitment to you and after that I
would be true from now on, but in the meantime, it didn’t matter what I did. That, of course, is a lie. Wanting to love someone means loving them now. Or not at all.
I went cross-country skiing today. The snow was beautiful and cold. As I skied, I thought about why I was a dipshit to you, and here, near as I can see, is it:
Before we met I had two wives and an uncountable number of relationships, ranging from twenty minutes to four months, and every woman had this in common—she was desperate. I thought a woman had to be a drunk, crazy, extraordinarily young, unhappily married, or in big trouble before she would want me. She had to need what I have to give—sex and money. I thought no one desirable could love me. I married women I knew it wouldn’t hurt to lose.
Then I met you, and you are desirable. You don’t need me. We simply have fun being together and that scared me so much I had trouble breathing. When you have something that matters, you have something to lose.
Katrina couldn’t touch me, so I slept with her. You could touch me, so I drove you away. And I regret it. And I am sorry.
Sam
Pete relapsed in early December. One evening he was tireder than usual and the next morning he didn’t get out of bed. Maurey, Chet, and a doctor floated in and out of Maurey and Pud’s old bedroom with exaggerated quietness and muffled tones. No one said it aloud, but the general feeling was this time was for keeps.
2
It was Tuesday, six days before Christmas. Maurey’s son, Auburn, and Roger, who can’t or won’t speak, sat perched on a board, solemnly watching me flake hay off bales. Behind the boys, I could see Hank Elkrunner’s ponytail and part of his right wrist, which snapped up and down as he turned the team toward the Gros Ventre River Road.
“Too fast,” Auburn shouted. “Gristle will hog it all.”
Gristle had two white feet and massive dingleberries hanging off her butt, and she’d appointed herself herd bully. Whenever I came near the equine bitch she would pull her lips off her teeth and lean toward my face. Hank said she smelled my fear, but I think she just enjoyed biting people.