by Tim Sandlin
“It’d be a quest story,” I said.
“I only deal in universal concepts.”
“What concept is more universal than waking up with a dry mouth?”
Of course he didn’t write my story; he’d rather write about Jesus playing baseball.
Lloyd shook me awake to darkness and a mythic dry mouth. He said, “We need gas.”
My lips made a frog-stuck-in-mud sound. Lloyd handed me a canteen he usually saved for the radiator and repeated himself. “We need gas. You have anything to trade for gas?”
I didn’t even swallow the water, just let it soak into my tongue like rain on dust. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Since you finished your bottle. We tried to wake you for supper.”
Moby Dick sat in a parking lot on the edge of a dark town. A hundred yards or so away lights shone through the windows of an Alka-Seltzer-shaped building. “I’m disoriented here, Lloyd. You got a fix on time or place? Why is everything shiny?”
He bent to squint through the windshield up at the sky. “Been raining. Two-thirty, maybe three. Some town in Arkansas. That building says ‘Trojans’ on the front.”
“Looks like a high school.”
“There’s a couple buses down there where we can borrow gas, only we need payment.”
I unbuckled my seat belt, opened Moby Dick’s door, and breathed in the wet night air. To tell the truth, I felt like honest death. A tequila hangover is more elemental than Yukon Jack’s. Imagine six hundred paper cuts on your brain.
“What’s wrong with Coors?” Behind me Andrew giggled in his sleep and Shane snored like a rhino.
“Nothing’s open,” Lloyd said. “We have to steal the gasoline, and it doesn’t feel right leaving beer. What if the people we steal it from are AA?”
I tipped my head and drank nearly a quart of water. Lloyd stayed patient. If I had to sum up Lloyd Carbonneau in one word, that’s the one I would say—patient.
“We’re talking a narrow line of ethics here, Lloyd. It’s okay to trade illegal beer for gasoline but not okay to steal it unless we leave something of value and not right if the thing we leave is beer?”
He thought awhile, then said, “Yes.”
“Just wanted to clarify my thoughts.”
“I have a battery charger we could trade, but we might need it later. Aren’t you carrying anything worth a few gallons?”
Dad’s creel was on the floor. In the hidden pocket I found the keys to the Bronco and what was now Dothan’s house and the silver hoop earrings Shannon gave me for Christmas. I held the earrings in the palm of my hand. “There’s these, but they mean something to me. I’d just as soon leave Coors and not worry about right and wrong.”
“How about that box?”
“The creel?” I ran my fingertips along the wicker and saw Dad standing in the Firehole River in his hip boots holding a cutthroat by the gills for Mom to ooh over.
Lloyd said, “Bus drivers can use a fishing box; unless they’re married earrings won’t do them much good.”
What would Dad want me to do? Hell with that, what would I want me to do? I started transferring Carmex and junk from the creel to Sam Callahan’s day pack. “Another piece of Dad bites the dust.”
“It’s good for you to let him go.”
“I won’t let him go for less than twenty gallons.”
***
Which was bravado. We only had a five-gallon reserve tank and two one-gallon Coleman fuel cans. “Let’s make two trips,” I said.
“Seven gallons will get us into Memphis, where we can trade for more. I used to know people in Memphis.”
We stood outside watching the rain drip on puddles and shapes pass back and forth behind the windows of what I took as a gymnasium. Beyond it the school lurked the way schools lurk at night. Closer to us, three school buses lined up under a security light facing the highway.
“I’m new at this, Lloyd. How do we steal gas from a school bus?”
Lloyd reached in under the driver’s seat to pull out a hose—four feet or so of that semi-clear stuff you string between beakers in high school chemistry. “We charge it on the Idaho credit card.”
“You always carry a siphon hose?” I asked.
He reached back in for a flashlight, which he handed to me. “First time we ran out of gas in Mexico I had to use Shane’s catheter.”
“Ouch.”
“This hose is the one auto accessory Shane paid for himself.”
***
Lloyd squatted in the gravel and sucked hose. After a few seconds his head jerked and he spit gasoline.
“Good thing schools always fill buses at the end of the day instead of mornings,” he said. “The hose wouldn’t reach anything less than a full tank.”
“Where did you learn schools gas up in the afternoon?”
Lloyd shrugged his bare shoulders. “You pick things up.”
The flow of gas into the tank made a tinkle sound, like Andrew peeing in a puddle. This didn’t shape up as a quick operation. I checked out the lights in the gymnasium—lit rooms on dark nights bring out the voyeur in me.
“Keep an eye posted for the police,” Lloyd said. “If they come, we flatten and roll under the bus.”
“They’ll see our cans.”
“Probably.”
Streetlights from the town glowed against the low clouds off to the east. West, it was Moby Dick, Hugo Sr., then blackness.
I nodded at the idling Oldsmobile. “That guy’s starting to give me the willies.”
Lloyd glanced back at Hugo. “He’s only staying close to his family.”
“Can’t he take a hint? Marcella doesn’t want him close to his family.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know what else to do.”
“Let’s paint a sign on the back of the ambulance that says ‘Too late, dickhead.’”
Lloyd bent to check the flow. “Forgiveness isn’t one of your strong points.”
“Forgiveness is for the pope. If a man nails around on his wife, he deserves to pay. Else every man would be nailing every woman. Fear is all that keeps pistols in the holster.”
“How about loyalty?”
“Sam Callahan wrote that a stiff dick hath no conscience.”
Lloyd spit again and I handed him the water I’d been hauling around ever since I woke up. He swished his mouth, gargled a moment, and spit.
“We all made mistakes, Maurey. You more than anyone should understand forgiveness. You’ll never get your baby back without it.”
I couldn’t settle on a rational comeback. After tequila, though, rational isn’t necessary for speech. “My mistakes have excuses. Hugo’s don’t.”
“How do you know his story?”
“There can be no excuse for adultery by males.”
“As opposed to females?”
“I can think of several reasons a woman might have to commit adultery.”
Lloyd smiled, pretending I was kidding. Maybe I was, maybe not, I don’t know. In certain situations women do deserve more slack than men. That’s because men made the rules. They’re the house and women are the gamblers, and everyone knows the only way a gambler can beat the house is to cheat.
“If Hugo lasts another day or two, I’ll vote that she takes him back,” Lloyd said.
“That’s because you want Sharon to take you back and you know she probably won’t.”
His head came up. “Why not?”
Words came in a rush. “Sharon was a little girl when she married you, Lloyd. She’s grown up by now. You can’t expect to find the same girl who loved you years ago.”
“Yes, I can,” he said.
“This search is stupid.”
The web of lines around his eyes went hurt child. I swear, I should be quarantined from sensitive men. The government could c
reate a pain zone one hundred yards away from me in all directions. Put up Keep Out signs like they do on the trails when a grizzly gets mean.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If anyone deserves forgiveness, you do.”
Lloyd reached out to make a minuscule hose adjustment. “We had a nice sunset this afternoon. Too bad you were asleep and missed it.”
“I had that coming.” He didn’t disagree, so I said, “I’m going for a walk while this deal fills up. No use both of us loitering at the scene of the crime.”
***
Lloyd had simplified life to Ivanhoesque terms: one single obstacle stands between me and happiness, and if I can overcome that obstacle, all problems will cease to exist. Lloyd’s peace of mind through the hard times was based on the lie that if he found his precious Sharon, they would automatically come together in rapture and love and all would be right with the world. So to speak. As it were.
My ethical question, wandering aimlessly through the damp parking lot, was, did I do the right thing? Is peace of mind based on a he better than no peace of mind at all?
I’d known other people who blamed all misfortune on one fixable fact. Fat people, for instance. There’s no one more depressed than a fat person who loses one hundred pounds and discovers the thin can be lonely, too. Or those southern women who are trained that by being pretty, sweet, and available, a man will swoop down and make everything nice. Ivanhoe swoops down and nothing changes except the women stop being pretty, sweet, and available.
I suspected sobriety of the same trick. Every chatterbox in America took for granted that if I quit drinking I’d win my baby Auburn back. If I quit drinking I would fall in love with a prince rather than a shithead. And the prince would fall in love with me. They said if I quit drinking my life would find direction and everything in the vicinity of it would no longer be ugly, turgid, and meaningless.
How the hell did they know? Sober women marry creeps. Sober women lose children. What if the deal was a colossal hoax, I abandoned the only dependable lover I’ve ever had—Yukon Jack—and afterward woke up to zippo? Emptiness? I could get screwed here.
I did the moth thing and drew toward the light. Five or six cars of the decade-old variety were parked close to a double-loading door, which I avoided. My tack was to stay on the dark edge of the parking area, then drift around the side of the Alka-Seltzer away from the highway. I found some glass doors, but they only looked in on a lobby-like room with two trophy cases flanking a large mosaic of a Trojan soldier’s helmet.
The trophy cases were lit by those tube lights they mount above paintings in art museums. The trophies were mainly for football with a smattering of fake-gold statuettes wearing shorts to indicate basketball and track. Not a skiing or rodeo trophy in the bunch.
Off left of the doors I discovered a ledge forty feet or so up that circled the building and passed in front of a bank of way-high windows. The fire escape was a piece of cake. I could have climbed it smashed.
The ledge itself was somewhat narrow for my tastes—I’m no mountain goat—and it was wet and sloped like five degrees the wrong way, but the windows were framed in concrete that made an okay handhold. Once past the side of the frame, I planted my elbows on the lower lip and cupped my hands around my eyes to peer in at the Land of Oz.
It was neat. Ten feet high, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion stood on one side of an immense throne, facing Toto and Judy Garland. Toto had a Pomeranian look about the nose and ears. Judy Garland’s hair was in pigtails.
Just guessing, I’d say tomorrow was prom night and the junior class or whoever does these things in Arkansas was transforming the gym into a theme park. Mainly the transformation required a heck of a lot of emerald green crepe paper.
A dozen teenagers moved around the room, drinking Cokes and laughing and putting on finishing touches. They must have had a glitter fight earlier because the kids sparkled, especially their hair. The girls wore shorts, the boys jeans; everyone was barefoot.
A boy who looked so much like Park my breath caught was painting a yellow brick road on an entire wall of butcher paper. The road receded up the wall through a forest filled with Munchkins and flying monkeys. At the bottom edge where the road came off the paper it met a yellow carpet strip that ran across the floor to the throne.
A girl straddling the top of a ladder called something to the Park-boy. He set down his brush and walked over to the ladder, where he picked a crown off the floor and, taking two steps up the ladder, lifted it to the girl. She had blond, bouncy hair and was wearing white shorts and an off-white pullover jersey. As she reached down to take the crown their fingers touched and they smiled in each other’s eyes. Bing. I wanted to cry.
“You finished?” Lloyd’s quiet voice came from below.
I looked down. “Are you?”
“Gas is in. All we need now is to prime the carburetor and hit the road.”
I looked back in to where the girl was balancing the crown at an angle on the Scarecrow’s two-dimensional head. Park was frozen, gazing up at her like a dancer in a musical who’s been told not to move a muscle till the starlet finishes her solo.
“I’ll be right down.”
Back on ground level, Lloyd asked, “See anything interesting?”
“The Land of Oz.”
“Was it nice?”
“At my prom we did Camelot better.”
32
At dawn I drove Moby Dick across the Mississippi River into Memphis. That’s one big river, especially for a woman raised on water you can throw a rock across. A couple of tugboats were passing under the bridge, pushing what looked like floating city blocks. The air was thick as Cool Whip.
“My dad had two rules when it came to choosing a place to live,” I said.
“Listen to those plug wires arc,” Lloyd said.
I didn’t hear anything. “First, he had to have a house where he could piss off the front porch without affronting the neighbors.”
“I burned a truck up on this bridge once. Fifty-four Dodge flathead-six vapor locked on me, then she blew. They had to close the bridge for three hours.”
“And second, he couldn’t stand anyone living upstream. Said he felt surrounded if people got to the water before he did.”
Lloyd rolled down the window. “Your dad wouldn’t like Memphis. Practically the whole country lives upstream.”
“Dad also didn’t trust anyone from east of the Mississippi—said if their kinfolk had an adventuresome spirit, they’d have gone someplace fresh.”
“Your dad might get a kick out of the part of town where we’re headed,” Lloyd said. “Men piss off porches on Cleveland Street.”
“Nobody sees?”
“Nobody cares.”
***
Cleveland Street was the epitome of what us hinterland types think of when someone says inner city stagnation. From the river, the tree progression went roughly magnolia, oak, cottonwood, nothing, with nothing being the plants in sight of the Calhoun Arms Hotel, which is where Lloyd directed me.
And as the trees moved from genteel to dead, the buildings followed the pattern. Right on the river is the largest Holiday Inn in humanity—glass and chrome twenty stories high. Cracked cinder block would describe the style on Cleveland Street. You know you’re in trouble when you look at a porch and think stoop.
Women dressed like Sugar Cannelioski leaned against parking meters and sat on the stoops.
“Are these hookers?” I asked.
“Not all of them,” Lloyd said. “Maybe.”
“Who needs a hooker at six-thirty in the morning?”
“International Harvester graveyard shifts. The men get off work and can’t sleep.”
“In Wyoming when we can’t sleep we watch television.”
Finding a place to stop wasn’t the nightmare I’d envisioned, thanks to parallel parking and lots of
open slots that time of day. As Lloyd fed pennies to the ambulance meter and I fed them to the trailer meter, a black woman in crack-climbers and a leather vest came over to complain.
“You’re blocking the view.”
I looked between the trailer and M.D. at an adult toy store across the street—Sodom and Gomorrah’s Sexual Paraphernalia Shoppe. The window was covered by brown paper.
“Not much of a view.”
“No, sister, the customer’s view of me.”
“Move down a few feet.”
“That’s someone else’s turf. Look, white lady, I got a baby and a junkie to feed, and I lose the territory at noon.”
In the movies big-city whores are tough and ruthless, they’ll knife a man in a flash and not let it bum out their evening. But this woman wasn’t any more brash than Marcella. She reminded me of a carhop.
“Didn’t mean to hurt your business,” I said.
“I know that, you got a couple dollars I can have?”
Lloyd knew of a public parking lot two blocks away where a friend of his used to work, but when we got there the man at the gate had never heard of Lloyd’s friend. Hell, it’d been three years since Lloyd drank in this neighborhood, ghetto parking attendant can’t be a lifelong career. A case of Coors lighter, we found a place along a graffiti-filled wall. The messages read Nigger, Eat Me, Jesus Saves, and Go Old Miss.
“Why must we stop at a hotel?” Shane complained. “Granma is only five hundred miles away. We can rest then.”
Lloyd slammed the hood and came to the passenger window. “We need to rake up some money. There’s times you can’t trade beer.”
Seven in the morning and sweat was already trickling down my rib cage. I’d never sweat, outside sex, anyway, at that time of day in my life. “How’re we going to rake up money?” I asked.
“You and I are going to sell something.”
“Not my silver hoop earrings.”
Shane struggled to pull down his pants. By now I was so used to seeing his act, I didn’t think twice. He said, “Perhaps I could secure a loan from Elvis, if you good folks swore to the Almighty you’d repay his kindness.”