by Tim Sandlin
Dot unscrewed the salt shaker lid and began poking a toothpick through it from the underside. She said, “Oly’s licking salt shakers again. He drools all over the top and spit gets in the little holes.”
“I wish you’d told me that before I salted my French fries,” I said.
Dot polished the lid with her apron. “He must have a salt deficiency. Why else would anyone go around licking salt shakers?”
I snuck a look at Maurey to see if she was still angry, and she was. A dime-size red circle burned under each cheekbone. Her eyes had drifted far away. I said, “I could have sworn Oly Pedersen was the oldest man in the valley when we moved here twenty years ago.”
“He turned ninety last summer,” Dot said. “He’s holding out for a hundred so Paul Harvey will say his name on the radio. I don’t think he’ll make it with a salt deficiency.”
“Oly’s going to outlive us all,” Maurey said with some bitterness.
“I guess I don’t mind so much.” Dot screwed the more or less clean top back on the salt. “This way I don’t have to fill the shakers half as often as I used to.”
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” Chet said. I noticed he was falling into the habit of dry irony. That’s not a habit you want to fall into permanently.
Dot went on. “Lydia says he’s doing a public service. The collective blood pressure of the county is going down from lack of salt.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about Lydia,” I said.
“Why aren’t we talking about Lydia?” Lydia hovered, the other side of Dot. I kept my head down. No one answered her question, so she went right on.
“Sam. Son of mine. The county plowed in my car last week and now it’s almost buried. I’d like you to come by and shovel my car out. Are you willing to cooperate?”
The secret was to study details. Count my remaining fries. Quantify the slaw. The white gravy next to my last chicken strip had congealed. The surface shone like a bald head.
“I’ll do it,” Chet said.
Lydia made a click sound in her throat. “Thank you, no. Shoveling out a car is a son’s duty.”
I compared the ketchup glint to the gravy glisten. The ketchup shone brighter. By moving my spoon an inch, I could reflect the fluorescent ceiling tube into the ketchup gleam.
Lydia said, “Hey, big shot, I’m talking to you.”
I said, “I am not prepared to deal with you at this time.”
She used her ugly voice. “I am not prepared to deal with you at this time.”
I risked a glance at Maurey and Chet. They’d opted for false deafness. “Lydia,” I said. “I will never be able to compete with you at sarcastic banter. I doubt if anyone can be as verbally cruel as you, so I choose to shut up.”
She slammed her fists on the table. Both Dot and my plate jumped an inch. “I’ll show you verbal cruelty, you little in-grate. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
I slowly turned my head. She wore tight jeans and a blouse that had been popular back in the fifties. She carried a leather purse shaped like a Western saddle. Because of my low angle and her eye makeup, she came off as fierce and forthright—the proud holder of righteous indignation.
I said, “I destroyed three families and a boy tried to kill himself.”
“And that’s my fault?” The vein in her forehead bulged out, pulsating in an almost sexual manner.
“Yes.”
“Sam, you’re thirty-three years old. You haven’t lived at home since you were eighteen.”
“Seventeen.”
“It’s time to stop blaming me every time you wet the bed.”
“What?”
“My not breast-feeding you had nothing to do with that boy resorting to suicide.”
Breast-feeding? The woman’s self-delusions floored me. “You said my fathers raped you when it was you who paid them two dollars each.”
“So I forgot some details.”
I studied Lydia’s face. As she’d aged, her neck got stringier, and a network of lines came off her mouth, but the eyes were the same. Did she not know what that lie had done to me? Did she honestly feel no remorse? “Mom, those details affect the way I see men. Women. Myself. Because of the rape story, I don’t think I’m capable of love. And I’m afraid it’s too late to change.”
She stared at me for a two-count, then she snapped open her purse and pulled out a Kleenex. “Here. Cry on something that cares.”
4
By early afternoon the bunkhouse twenty-gallon water heater had recovered from the morning rush and it was my turn to shower. I like showers. Generally, they make me feel renewed, as if a clean body equals a clean slate, but TM Ranch bunkhouse showers leave a lot to be desired. That’s because the stall has rusted seams that turn the water brown as it passes over your feet, and after you dry off you have to go back outside and circle around to your room. Nobody much minds in summer when all it takes is flip-flops and boxer shorts, but winter means completely redressing, boots included.
During the rinse cycle I went into a daydream where Shannon wins the first Nobel Prize in Anthropology. The Swedish government flies both of us to Stockholm and puts us up in the finest hotel in Europe, one of those places where the maid turns down your bed at night so you don’t have to fluff your own pillow. At the ceremony, Shannon, vibrant and beautiful as she is, stands before the hall of intellectuals and gives me all the credit.
“I never would have discovered the lost civilization of Borneo if not for the continued love and support of my dad,” Shannon says, “and I am here to announce that I have named the era that these people flourished as the Samcallahantic Period.”
Then Shannon kisses me on both cheeks and my stomach goes soppy nauseous. The nausea-from-love stomach part actually happened in the shower. Just thinking about my daughter could do that to me.
When I turned off the water the pipes made a painful shuddering sound. I stepped from the stall to find Hank standing between me and my towel, holding a chain saw.
He said, “The boys and I are going after a Christmas tree.”
I don’t do well when I’m naked and other people aren’t. “Won’t a Christmas tree be kind of maudlin, what with Pete dying and all?”
“Maurey decided Auburn and Roger deserve a Christmas. There hasn’t been much cheer the last few months. She gave orders no one is to be depressed from after the funeral through New Year’s.”
I shifted to slide past him to my towel on the nail on the wall, but Hank didn’t take the hint. Instead, he averted his eyes the way Blackfeet are supposed to when they have something serious to say.
“Your mother cried this morning,” he said.
“Lydia hasn’t cried since the day she was born, and that was only a rumor.”
He nodded. “After the two of you shouted at one another in Dot’s, I drove her home and she cried in the truck.”
I considered what this might mean. “Regret or manipulation?”
“It appeared as regret.”
“How would you know with Lydia?”
“She feels badly about what she did.”
“Then why doesn’t she say so?”
The outside door opened and Chet entered. He said, “It’s getting cold out there.”
Hank said, “Should be zero tonight.”
Great. Now I’m naked in front of a Blackfoot with a chain saw and a known homosexual. Chet sat on the changing bench and lit a cigarette, cool and calm as if he were waiting for a bus. I have this recurring dream where I’m in a crowd of well-dressed people and I’m nude but no one seems to notice. Must be a primal fear thing because the dream shrivels my penis.
“How’s Pete’s eulogy coming along?” Chet asked.
“What?”
“We truly appreciate you taking care of it. I know you and Pete didn’t always see eye to eye, but he respect
ed your creative drive. Even though he never read one, I heard him say more than once that your novels are an achievement.”
I tried holding my hands, casually, so they covered me without it appearing that I was covering myself on purpose.
Chet lifted his face to look straight into my eyes. “I know you’ll do Pete right by your eulogy.”
Behind my back, the toilet flushed. The commode stall door opened and closed and Toinette said, “Can I tag along when you go to cut the Christmas tree?”
My manhood disappeared in a black forest of pubic hair.
***
“Looking at a woman as an object you can give pleasure to is just as bogus as looking at a woman as an object that can give pleasure to you. It’s still looking at the woman as an object.” Maurey downshifted on a grade, then hit the flats and punched the gears back into fourth. The woman was fearless in four-wheel drive. Ice meant nothing.
“But it makes me feel worthwhile when I save a woman.”
She rammed back into third for a corner. “You can’t save a woman by giving her an orgasm.”
Words to live by. “Even if she isn’t getting them in her normal life?”
“Right. Have you slept with this Gilia girl?”
“Of course not.”
“What ‘of course not’? You’ve slept with half the heifers in the Confederacy. It shouldn’t be unreasonable to ask if you’ve slept with someone you actually like.”
“Gilia’s a friend.”
“Since when are friends off limits?”
I looked out at the red willow wands sprouting from the snow crust and tried to come up with an explanation. “Friendship love is real; romantic love is conditional—don’t sleep with anyone else, don’t be a constant drunk, get a job, don’t commit social blunders in front of my parents, love me back—and romantic lovers are based on chemical attraction; to me that isn’t very important compared to real love.”
Maurey ripped back into fourth and shot around a snow plow. She said, “I can see now why your wife left you.”
“Me too.”
Far to the south, the sun was setting with all the power of a weak flashlight beam. The dash clock said 4:30 and I remembered from some book that this was the shortest day of the year. Across the valley, green lights flickered on as an outline for the runway. I said a small prayer to Whomever to bring my daughter safely out of the sky.
“Do you think it’s possible for people to change?” I asked.
Maurey glanced at me, then back at the road. In the soft pink light of the alpenglow her face was the same as I pictured it from twenty years past, when we were lovers.
“I did,” she said.
“But you had alcohol you could quit. People with concrete problems like alcoholism or obesity or an abusive husband can solve the problem and, ultimately, change themselves. What about us poor stooges who are vaguely miserable, but don’t have any real monsters to battle against?”
Maurey downshifted and hit the blinker behind a line of cars turning into the airport. “Everybody’s vaguely miserable sometimes,” she said, “and most people are vaguely miserable most of the time. The trick is to scrap your way from the most-of-the-time to the some-of-the-time category.”
“How?”
She ticked off on her fingers. “True love, kids, mountains, exercise, and work you think matters. If none of that does it, I’d consider antidepressants.”
Maurey flashed on her brights and pulled to within a car’s length of a new Ford pickup, seemingly intent on blinding its driver. She said, “Speaking of vaguely miserable, that’s Dothan ahead of us.”
I peered at the spotlessly clean truck with the bumper sticker I still didn’t get. “You think Dothan’s miserable?”
“Deep down inside, Dothan can’t stand himself.”
“He hides it well.”
“None of the valley women will touch him with a stick. Dot says he’s flying in some bimbo from Denver whose husband is in chemotherapy. Even you never sank that low.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
***
Dothan Talbot beat me up in the seventh grade. He rubbed my face in the snow and twisted my arm around my back, then he became Maurey’s boyfriend after I had already impregnated her. He knew I had impregnated her and I knew he was touching her with his grubby fingers, so it was only natural for us to evolve into lifelong enemies. Plus, Dothan was, and still is, a Class A jerk. He’d have been in the Mafia if he had come from a town of over five hundred people. As it is, he sells real estate.
I ran into him in the airport bathroom. Shannon’s plane was late, like they all are in winter here, and I was nervous about seeing her. Up until then, I’d been fairly numb over what a mess I’d made of life, but now with Shannon’s arrival I was going to have to start feeling again, and I wasn’t sure I was ready.
When I’m nervous I need to pee every five minutes, so I left Maurey in the terminal and went to the bathroom, where I found Dothan standing in front of a mirror, combing Brylcreem into his hair. He’s worn his hair the same way for as long as I’ve known him, which means he must have greased out ten thousand pillows since junior high.
He glanced at me in the mirror and grinned the way people will when they hate your guts. “Hello, Callahan.”
“Yeah, right.” I needed to go pretty bad but I wasn’t about to pull out my pecker in front of Dothan. Standing in the middle of the room doing nothing felt stupid. The only alternative was washing my hands at the sink next to him.
“Still Maurey’s puppy, I see,” Dothan said.
It was one of those water-saving sinks where you push a button to get water but the moment you let go of the button a spring or something pops it back up and the water flow stops. This works fine if only one hand is dirty.
“You know the whole town laughs at you behind your back,” Dothan said.
I pushed the button with my right hand and squeezed soap from the dispenser with my left. Dothan’s primping style also took two hands—one for combing and one for patting grease.
He said, “I’m telling you as a favor. No one else in the valley will tell you the truth but I can give it to you straight. They all know you slipped the meat to Maurey once twenty years ago and you’ve been following her around sniffing her panties and being pitiful ever since.”
I lathered my hands.
Dothan stared at me in the mirror. “Maurey’ll never let you have sloppy seconds. Everyone knows she takes your money and doesn’t give shit back.”
I held the button with my left hand and rinsed the right, then switched off the other way.
“If I paid for her queer brother’s funeral, I’d at least get a blow job,” Dothan said.
Holding my hands up, I walked to the hot-air dryer and punched it on with my elbow. Over the whir of blowing air, I said, “Dothan, you’re never going to have a friend in your whole life.”
Dothan laughed heartily as he headed for the door. Halfway through, he turned back and said, “Maurey’s laughing at you, son. Just like me and everybody else.”
***
Dothan’s bimbo was first off the plane and across the runway. She had zit-red hair with black roots and wore a yellow halter thing and tight pants that were totally inappropriate for winter. The two of them kissed and rubbed against each other in a disgusting public display of affection made all the more poignant by the fact her husband was off in a hospital somewhere with cancer.
“Are we friends?” I asked Maurey.
She was watching Dothan and the tramp. “Of course we’re friends.”
“You aren’t laughing at me behind my back?”
Maurey touched my arm. “You’ve been listening to Dothan again. When are you going to learn he’s nothing but a dildo with ears.”
“You’re right.”
“There she is.”
Shannon came off the plane, wearing a yoked down jacket and some kind of jeans that weren’t Levi’s or Wranglers. As she made her way down the steps, she was talking to an older, gentlemanly type with a mustache and a cane. Shannon looked confident and composed, at home in her element. Nineteen-year-old women weren’t composed when I was nineteen.
Maurey said, “Airport scenes are so much nicer when the passengers walk down the steps and across the runway. Those tunnels took the romance out of flight.”
Shannon said good-bye to the old man and came bouncing across the runway and I had that Jesus, shit, I created this feeling I always get when I see her for the first time after a separation. Shannon didn’t seem any less a miracle now than the day she was born.
Then she burst through the double doors, all smiles and laughs. I think for a moment she forgot she was here for a funeral. She gave me a two-handed hug and a kiss on the cheek, then she moved on to Maurey. They hadn’t seen each other since summer, and Shannon finally remembered Pete and the purpose of the trip, so the hugs were spirited and meaningful.
“I appreciate you coming,” Maurey said.
Shannon’s brown eyes went smoky. “Uncle Pete was always nice to me. When I was little he used to send me flowers on Valentine’s.”
I didn’t remember that. It seemed like something I should remember.
Maurey said, “More than once Pete told me you were the only thing I ever got right,” and they hugged again.
Shannon had brought two suitcases plus her carry-on, so we had to wait at the conveyor belt surrounded by skiers in off-colored clothes. They talked loudly about inches and runs. I glared at boys who were checking out my daughter. Maurey got as many looks as Shannon, but I figured I had no right to glare at Maurey’s bunch. She was old enough to handle oglers without my help.
As often as they talked on the telephone, you’d think Shannon and Maurey wouldn’t have that much left to catch up on, but the moment I finished the how-was-your-flight formalities they launched into mother-daughter gossip. Shannon gave a detailed description of a pair of boots she almost bought for the trip, Maurey talked about horses and how successful Pud was in the satellite dish repair business. Shannon gave a Eugene report.