by Tim Sandlin
Copyright © 1988 by Tim Sandlin
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Cover design by Jessie Sayward-Bright
Cover image © David Redfern/Getty Images
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following lyrics:
From “Wine Over Matter” by Pinto Bennett and Baxter Black. © 1983 by Motel Cowboys, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
From “Leavin’ on Your Mind” by Webb Pierce and Wayne Walker. © 1962 by Cedarwood Publishing Company (A Division of Musiplex Group, Inc.). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
From “You Are My Sunshine” by Jimmy Davis and Charles Mitchell. © 1940 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed assigned to Peer International Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
From “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To” by J. Gluck, W. Gold, and H. Weiner. © 1963 by Arch Music Co., Inc., and World Song Publ. Inc. All rights administered by Chappell & Co. Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
From “Echo of an Old Man’s Last Ride” and “Hole in My Life” by Bruce Hauser. © 1980 by Up the Creek Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Originally published in New York in 1988 by Henry Holt and Company.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sandlin, Tim.
Western swing : a novel / Tim Sandlin.
p. cm.
1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Women country musicians—Fiction. 3. Married people—Fiction. 4. Marital conflict—Fiction. 5. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. Wyoming—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A517W47 2011
813’.54—dc22
2010051764
Also by Tim Sandlin
The GroVont Books
Skipped Parts
Sorrow Floats
Social Blunders
Lydia
Sex and Sunsets
The Pyms: Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole
Honey Don’t
Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty
Rowdy in Paris
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Three
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Four
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Five
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
About the Author
Back Cover
For Emily and Rocky
Acknowledgments
I had a lot of help with this one. For financial assistance, I’d like to thank Jody Carlson, John Van Gossen of the Wyoming State Vocational Rehabilitation Department, and Jim Clark of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Musical know-how came from Shelley Clark and Kelly Rubrecht. Special thanks and affection go to Caleb, Lonicera, Matt, Ben, and Douglas. Tell your mothers to write. Tracy Bernstein tracked down the song permissions for me and Marian Wood took care of everything else.
Prologue
Loren held the sewing needle under hot running water. Twirling the eye end between his fingers, he hummed a song to himself—an old song written by a former governor of Louisiana. It was called “You Are My Sunshine” and Loren liked the words because he understood them.
He shut off the water with his left hand, and still humming and twirling the needle between his thumb and index finger, he walked into his room and sat on the edge of the bed, on the Daffy Duck king-size bedspread. Loren looked at the needle. “Simple enough,” he said.
His humming broke into words, “You make me happy, when skies are gray. You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you…” Loren lifted the needle and jabbed it into his left palm.
Blood flowed out of his hand, filling the cup made by lifting his thumb and little finger. “Please don’t take my sunshine away.”
Leaning forward, he dribbled blood into his typewriter keyboard, starting at the Q and moving slowly down and to the right to the ?, then up past the P and O and back across to Z.
Lana Sue came through the door carrying a handful of folded socks and humming a song of her own, one he didn’t recognize. She opened the bottom drawer of his chest and dropped in the socks.
“What the hell are you doing, Loren?”
“I’m starting a new novel.”
“By bleeding into the typewriter?”
“It’s symbolic.”
Talking over her shoulder as she walked into the bathroom, Lana Sue asked, “Of what?”
“I don’t have to explain my symbols.”
She came back with a wad of toilet paper which she placed in Loren’s hand. “Make a fist.” She clenched Loren’s hand around the toilet paper. “I suppose you want to cleanse the crap. Prove to the reader that you’re giving your all this time.”
“More of an offering to New York City.”
Lana Sue sat beside Loren on the bed and held his bleeding over the floor so none of the drip stained her bedspread. “Elevate this,” she said. “It’ll stop in a minute. What’s this one going to be about?”
“The book?”
“Yes, Loren. What’s the book about?”
“Children abandoning their parents, mostly.”
“I’ve read that one.”
“Also true love, God, and the difference between good and bad.”
“You know the difference between good and bad?”
“Sure. I’ve been listening to your Hank Williams and Patsy Cline albums.”
Lana Sue looked at the mess on the typewriter. “You’re compromising.”
“I haven’t even started. How can I be compromising?”
“You bled all over the old Royal portable. You’ll write the book on the electric Remington.”
“Blood would gum up the Remington. I wouldn’t get to write at all.”
“It doesn’t work if you bleed into the wrong machine, Loren.”
“It doesn’t?” Loren’s hand started to thro
b.
Lana Sue shook her head. “Nope, sorry.”
“Do we have any Band-Aids?”
Part One
1
Sometimes I have these gaps which are amazingly like being dead except that they don’t last, and I have an awful feeling that being dead lasts.
I shot through a gap to find the sun warm on my back. I was sitting in the dirt between two rocks on the spine of a dark green ridge. The rock on my left had a shape like a small foreign car, a hatchbacked Saab from the early seventies. The other rock, on my right, was smaller, more rounded, and pockmarked with lichen. My fingers held a lower larkspur, twisting it slowly counterclockwise.
One of the rules I made many years ago, back when I used to make rules: A good time is not worth having if you can’t remember it. That’s why the gaps are like death. Death is not a good time.
• • •
It was the quiet hot of midday, the sky fairly buzzing with color, light blue across the canyon, darker blue to the north over Yellowstone, shading to silver and blinding near the sun. The carpet of brown lodgepole pine needles rustled and boiled around me. Each needle was sliced in half and connected at the base. I knew they were lodgepoles because spruce and fir aren’t sliced and limber pine needles are cut in fives.
My stomach hurt from a lack of food. One of my eyes itched like crazy, and I knew enough not to rub it and make it worse, but I didn’t know enough to solve the problem by dropping the larkspur. A male Barrow’s goldeneye made a neck-out landing on the cirque pond far below me. Above, a jet messed up the scene by leaving a white trail across an otherwise faultless sky. The roar came from the back end of the vapor, as if the sound had been left behind.
I now reached into my left front shirt pocket and withdrew a three-by-five-inch card, pink line above a series of blue lines. I read, Your name is Loren Paul.
Oh.
• • •
The goldeneye and a mate I hadn’t noticed earlier skipped across the pond, rose in a three-quarter circle over a budding chokecherry, and flew west toward lower altitudes where they belonged. In their wake, they left a V pattern on the water punctuated by expanding doughnuts made by their wingtips on the takeoff. I thought about how I might word it to Lana Sue when I saw her in a few days. We could sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee while I diagrammed the design of V and dots. She would ask with some skepticism how I knew the ducks were Barrow’s goldeneyes and which one was the male.
If I saw Lana Sue in a few days. Our last contact had ended with her Toyota spitting gravel into my face.
The chokecherry exploded and burst into flames.
Indian boys used to not eat for four days and stray into the woods in search of a Vision. Jesus fasted forty and met Satan, who gave him a ride to the mountaintop. Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Max Brand, Martin Luther King, and the Son of Sam all had Visions. I’d gone three long, foodless days in hopes of seeing just such an occurrence as a spontaneous fireball, but now that it was actually happening, I had trouble buying the bit.
I looked at the sky. Still blue. A raven wheeled far up above the peaks. No, two ravens, one barely a dot. I wondered if they saw the fire. Far to the west, over by the Tetons, a stringy cloud crept across the horizon. Taking out the card, I read my name again. Loren Paul. I already knew that. The flames didn’t spread, in fact they appeared to be dying a brown smoky death. If somebody wanted to attract my attention and reveal the Purpose, He wasn’t being awfully patient about the whole thing.
My own religious preferences run closer to the Cheyenne Medicine Wheel than the Presbyterian Whitebeard, and this was just the kind of trick Father Coyote liked to pull in the stories, so I figured I better shimmy down the cliff face for a reality check.
Father Coyote? I was beginning to think like a Peanuts character who hauls a blanket around to fight off stage-four anxiety attacks.
This wasn’t really a valley or a canyon. My hero, Max Brand, would call it a coulee—not a term you hear that often in conversation. I look the face by a friction descent, scraping both hands raw on rock, loose sand, and sticky greasewood. My daypack and canteen lay in the dirt up top, a mistake because a terrible dry mouth came on halfway down the slope.
The chokecherry bush smoldered next to an empty gallon of Coleman fuel. I touched the black branch, jerking back in quick pain. The fire was definite. The hallucination theory was dead. Which pissed me off. Neither God nor Father Coyote has to resort to Coleman fuel to ignite a chokeberry bush. So far as I know, there’s not a single believed-in deity on earth would even need a match.
Therefore, somebody was fucking with my head.
Since Lana Sue yelled “I’m not going down with you, Loren,” and left in a huff, Marcie VanHorn was the only person with any notion of my whereabouts. Marcie was sixteen and lived in a tube top. No one in a tube top would do this to me.
The blackened branch leaped aside and a shot echoed through the canyon. I dived, down and right, rolled onto my feet and hit dirt next to a Volkswagen-sized boulder. The dry mouth took on a hot aluminum taste. My throat closed. Since the shot could have come from anywhere, there was no way to tell if I was hiding behind cover or in front of it.
The rock next to my ear splintered. Another shot rang up the hill. I crab-scrambled to the back side of the boulder, then belly-slid over to another, smaller rock.
The secret seemed to be to resist panic, to breathe slowly and use my skittering brain. The hiding spot was a good choice so long as whoever was firing stayed put. I had no reason to think he would. Nothing on earth could have stopped this character from walking across the clearing, stepping around the boulder, and blowing my crotch into the creek.
The third shot skipped off my rock and over my head. I flattened, face pressed into gravel. The scene felt almost unreal. I mean, I was once a late sixties South Texas longhair, so I know about drug wars, peace marches gone bad, redneck insurrection—all that love generation jive—but, at thirty-five, I had never been shot at before. Everyone should be shot at once. It fosters humility.
Surprisingly enough, I didn’t wet my leg. My theory is that modern American life—TV, movies, the few of us who read books—prepares us for violence. We go out each day fully expecting to be shot. I know I do. Or it could be the absence of booze and food undid my survival instinct.
Instead of screaming, I crouched in the fetal position of a breech baby, remembering Buggie. I thought of a story he once told me about a white rabbit who could speak English even after it had been killed, skinned, and cooked. The rabbit said, “If you eat me you’ll get a hare caught in your throat.”
I suddenly got the joke.
Another shot cracked the rock. I lay my ear against the ground and imagined the slap-slap of hunting boots coming to finish me off. It appeared I would discover what happens after we die by the same method as everyone else. Would he blast me from several feet away or hold the barrel flush against my temple so I could feel the cold metal before my brains scattered?
Whenever I’m someplace and I don’t know the proper course of action, I always ask myself, “What would Jimmy Stewart do if he was here?” This is a fine way to make decisions because Jimmy always knew right from wrong and bravery from chicken-shit. I tried Cary Grant or Max Brand, but ran into situations where they didn’t apply. Jimmy Stewart always applies.
However, the Stewart Standard had never come up in a crisis of physical danger—I’m rarely in real physical danger. One thing for certain, Jimmy never cowered behind a rock waiting for death. He acted—either attack or evade, depending on the reel—but never did he wait while others romped all over him.
Attacking didn’t seem feasible because I was unarmed. I own a rifle—a 7 mm Ruger Magnum I bought to scare snowmobilers and dirt bikers off our land. I’ve never shot it at anything more mobile than “Listen to the Warm” by Rod McKuen. Besides, it was back home in a cottonwood-post gun rack. Who thi
nks to take a rifle along when he’s searching for God?
That left the Jimmy Stewart method of evasion. I raised my head to scan the immediate area. Grass, a few larkspur and balsam root, pond upstream, meadow down—nothing to stop a bullet. Fifteen feet from my rock a line of willows ran along both sides of the creek, stretching downstream to the edge of the clearing and beyond. If I made the thicket, I could snake around, maybe even slide into the water, and lose the sniper.
Of course, the sniper would know that also and have his sights trained on that side of the rock. One budge toward the creek and he could nail me. But aiming a rifle barrel at one spot for minutes on end is not that easy. Sooner or later, he’d have to relax and that would be the moment to make my dive.
I tried to picture the guy. Did he know me? Or was the whole thing a random ambush—some retard with khaki pants and a long-bore rifle, slobbering on himself, snarling, “I’m gonna set these chokecherries on fire and shoot anyone that comes by.” The guy probably rhymed fire with jar and drew faces in the dirt when he peed.
Jimmy Stewart wouldn’t wait long and neither could I. I edged my knees up under my chest, raised onto my toes, and hesitated a moment to see if he’d shoot my ass off. When he didn’t, I said a little prayer to God knows who and took off.
2
The summer I turned fourteen, I decided dogs and cats were agents of God, angels who spied on us and reported unclean thoughts and screwups to the man up top. Actually, dogs reported to cats, who spoke directly to God. Dogs can’t talk to God. Just cats.
The episode was discovered when I attached notes to Him onto neighborhood dog and cat collars. I know what you’re doing, but it’s okay. You can trust me not to tell anyone. Please let me go.
Neighbors complained to Mom and my stepdad, who sent me to a county extension analyst, who said the problem was artificial flavors and coloring and if I ate better I still wouldn’t be happy, but at least I wouldn’t bother anyone.
We—Lana Sue and I—own two dogs and two cats now: Rocky, Josie, Fitz, and Zelda. I still won’t do anything in front of the animals that I don’t want God or Lana Sue to know about.