Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  I hate you,

  Patsy Holt

  I tried to picture Patsy Holt. I decided she was fifty-six and parted her iron-black hair down the middle and ate frozen dinners every night. Probably drank buttermilk by the gallon. Maybe I should move to Nebraska and meet her and not tell her who I am. We could fall in love and have oral sex orgasms and later, after we married, I’d pull out the letter and we’d have a big laugh.

  The jay cried “Jeeah” as the sun dipped behind a cloud. An awful lot of clouds had drifted in while I was wallowing around the willow thicket. The breeze on my face suddenly felt cooler. Starting on the right, I began stuffing items into the daypack. I was sure Loren’s—my—crux lay in that pile of junk somewhere, but it was beyond me to figure where. He carried an unneeded rubber and wasn’t popular in Nebraska. Not much to go on when the goal is perfect truth.

  Time to move up the mountain. Packed, fed, and anxious to hit the trail, I stood on the side of the coulee to look one last time at the burned chokecherry next to the bubbling creek. It was real. I wasn’t paranoid.

  • • •

  Confession time. I have this semidisgusting personality flaw in that, at times, many times, I act stupider than I am. For years I blamed the habit on Mom—as she took my clunkiness for granted, I grew into it—but Mom’s over fifteen years back down the road so the rationale should have petered out by now.

  My ignorance of the unused rubber is just the sort of false innocence that drives Lana Sue nuts. I know damn well the intentions of that condom—Marcie VanHorn. I’d like a witness here that the offending item lay snuggled in my daypack, still sealed in aluminum foil. Although unfulfillment won’t help much if Lana Sue catches on. She’s as likely to kick ass over what I wanted to do as what I did.

  Marcie VanHorn and her father, Lee, are our closest neighbors. They live a half mile down the town road in a barn they’ve converted into a house next to a house they’ve converted into a barn. Marcie is a winner. At sixteen, with a ripe body, high energy, and a trust fund, what could you expect? She’s the image of those teenage girls in the JC Penney catalog who model shortie nighties in poses of slumber-party pillow fights—tight butt, long legs, small breasts, eyes that challenge.

  Things would have remained totally theoretical if Lee VanHorn hadn’t organized a welcome-to-the-valley pack trip the summer we moved to Jackson Hole. Lana Sue hated her horse, didn’t like the mosquitoes, and missed her cigarettes, all of which got taken out on me. Meanwhile, Marcie read Yeast Infection, bought the sensitive-poet-at-heart inference, and fell into instant, if temporary, adoration. I eat up adoration.

  Even then, things could have stayed on a level of a guilt-inducing wet dream, but the second night out, Lana Sue didn’t hobble the hated horse properly and he gimped off up the canyon. Lee discovered the escape and he and Lana Sue gave chase, which left Marcie and me tending the fire. There, in the orange flicker of the campsite, the little hardbody offered herself to me.

  Side by side, we sat on stumps, staring into the burning coals. Marcie touched my hand with fingers hot from holding a cup of fresh-made instant cocoa. “Virginity is too big a deal,” she said. “It’s awful pressure, but I can’t see cracking it with a boy from school. He might get all hung up.”

  I sipped chocolate with my free hand. “I see your problem, Marcie.”

  “I need an older man, someone experienced, who would be gentle and teaching, then afterwards, not bother me anymore.”

  “Maybe if we think hard, we’ll come up with someone.” False stupidity again. I knew Marcie’s bottom line.

  She looked at me with those pale, pale eyes and that blossoming sixteen-year-old body. “Will you make love to me, Loren?”

  I sipped and stared into the fire. She was a child, Lana Sue and I had only been married two months, Lee had a room full of guns and every right to use one. But then, look at the trust in her eyes and the promise in those tangerine breasts. Yes or no, I would live to regret the answer.

  “No.”

  Marcie sighed. “Wish we had some schnapps for the chocolate.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t be honored. Maybe someday, after I’ve been married longer.”

  She smiled. “You know where I live.”

  Two years later, ten minutes after Lana Sue called the marriage quits, I grabbed fifty cents off her bureau and drove the Chevelle to the Cowboy Joe Service Station MEN’S room.

  4

  Once, again, I found myself trudging through red dust with a U-shaped canyon on the left and dense Doug fir on the right. Far to the right, above where the Tetons would be if I could see through the trees, silent lightning flashed once, then again a few seconds later. With luck, I might see a distant storm if I made the top of the Indian by nightfall. God likes to reveal secrets in bad weather.

  The trail took a hard right where a dry side canyon came in to join the main creek. The elbow of the ridge overlooked one of those scenic vistas you see on a Friends of the Earth calendar. The kind with a photo of a lone hiker wearing two thousand dollars worth of equipment and standing with his toes over the edge, gazing out at the wondrous glory of the wild. I never stand with my toes over the edge.

  A huge old quaking aspen jutted through the rocks on the other side, the forested non-edge side of the trail. Compared to pine, aspen are a snap to climb. The leaves don’t hurt. The branches are spaced like playground equipment. Though the view from twelve feet off the ground was basically the same as the one seen standing on it, once I settled myself and the day-pack into an almost comfortable niche, I felt more secure, in control. I’ve always felt safe in trees. No memories can get you—no lions, or tigers, or bears.

  The afternoon sun did nice glittery things to the rocks across the canyon, making them sparkle and pulsate slightly. Way down there, flowing toward my pond and burnt chokecherry, the stream changed colors from green to blue to silver-gray. I saw a coyote. Imagine that. Shaggy tail and all, I saw a coyote who didn’t see me.

  I pulled out the notebook and pen—God might want me to take notes—then fluffed the pack into a respectable tree pillow. I hummed a low song—theme from The Andy Griffith Show—in hopes of driving all thoughts from my mind. First rule of the mystic business: You must think of nothing in order to think of anything new. The server cannot pour hot coffee into a full cup. So to speak.

  The sun moved. The aspen leaves quaked. Wispy clouds formed themselves into faces and puppies and soft, white cow-flops. An ant crawled across my thumb and I massacred him. My eyes itched. I developed an intense erection.

  Opening the notebook, I sucked the pen a moment, then wrote, There’s no aphrodisiac as strong as belief in death.

  This made me think of Lana Sue. I wondered where she was and who she was under. Lana Sue wasn’t a self-analyzing deep spirit like me. She enjoyed things she liked and avoided things she didn’t. Great attitude if you can get away with it.

  I don’t know why Lana Sue went for my line and I don’t care to know. By now I’ve learned if you’re unpretentiously extreme enough, some woman somewhere is going to be impressed. Only normal men grow old alone.

  I stole Lana Sue from a low-quality music agent who stole her from a pedal steel guitar player named Mickey who stole her from an oral surgeon named Ron. To my limited knowledge, Lana Sue never spent a night alone since her first honeymoon over twenty-one years ago. I asked her about it on our wedding night.

  “How long was there between Ron and Mickey?” I asked.

  Lana Sue sat in a chair next to the bed, reading a six-month-old Rolling Stone and wearing a long red T-shirt with nothing on underneath.

  She licked a finger to flip the page. “What do you mean?”

  “Ron was your first mate. Then Mickey was. How long was the time between them?”

  She raised her eyes from the paper. “How long does it take to drive from Houston to Lubbock?”

  “Eigh
t or nine hours.”

  “Eight or nine hours, then.”

  I lay on the bed, looking at brochures for Jackson Hole. Since Yeast Infection sold, we were thinking of moving out of Denver. The pictures of mountains, log cabins, and healthy, fulfilled people made Jackson Hole look like a better neighborhood. Besides, I had hidden motivation: Buggie might still be there.

  “How about Mickey and Ace?”

  “How about Mickey and Ace?”

  “How long was that gap?”

  “We were in a motel. Ace had a room three doors down.” She watched now to see if this affected me.

  I pretended to study a picture of a nice cabin with a couple of outbuildings. A rock chimney rose from each end of the shingled roof. A Saint Bernard stood next to the front door, staring glassy-eyed at the photographer. Oddly enough, three months later we bought the place.

  “You packed your stuff and moved three doors down?”

  “Ace and I flew out that afternoon, so Mickey never had to listen to the bedsprings or anything.”

  Her legs were crossed at the thighs and her feet lay propped on mine on the bed. The whole scene felt real comfortable and domestic. I didn’t want to be an irritant.

  “When was the last night you slept alone?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Think about it. Can you remember a single time where you slept all night without a man in the bed?”

  Lana Sue cocked her head off to one side and looked at me. “No.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

  Pulling her feet off mine, she stood and walked to the door and switched off the light, “No.”

  • • •

  Following the theory that you lose ’em the way you get ’em, I knew right from the beginning that I would outlive my marriage. Lana Sue doesn’t have the attention span to stay with anyone forever. I can accept that.

  However, the wise husband does not leave a beautiful woman who has never slept alone alone. I have several times now—the Flannery O’Connor trip to Georgia, another drive to Maryland, a couple of solitary backpacking ventures—but, so far as I know, she stayed true through it all. So far as I know. I don’t think she would hide it from me if she did sleep with someone. Lana Sue’s not that kind of woman.

  The day before my Search, when Lana Sue hit me in the ear with the vacuum cleaner and screamed, “That’s it, Loren. Crack. You lose,” she’d been mad enough and self-righteous enough to guiltlessly hump every cowboy in northwest Wyoming.

  • • •

  A person invaded. Right there, trotting down the trail in my wilderness—light blue Bill Rogers running suit, Nike shoes featuring the patented swoosh, hair blond as a manila envelope—it was an off-road jogger. On my mountain.

  I threw a jar of neat’s-foot oil at his head. Unfortunately, I missed.

  He stopped and said, “Shit.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  His words came in a rush as he tried to control his breathing. “Running. What are you doing?”

  “I’m looking for my son.”

  “In a tree?”

  I didn’t owe this guy any explanations. “Everyone looks like you in San Diego. You should run there.”

  “It’s a free mountain.”

  “You hear that on Donahue or Letterman?”

  The jogger had stopped moving forward, but he hadn’t stopped moving. He kept shifting from one foot to the other in a kind of toe spring. He held his hands in front of his ribs like a squirrel.

  “Have you seen anyone with a rifle?” I asked.

  “A rifle?”

  “Might be a woman from Nebraska.”

  His eyes squinted because the sun was right above my head. He had to look into it to see me. “No, no women at all.”

  “How about anyone with a rifle?”

  “I’ve run this trail three times a week all summer, and you’re the first person I’ve seen up here.”

  “Why?”

  He stopped running in place and leaned one hand on my tree. “Why what?”

  “Why have you run this trail three times a week all summer?”

  “I’m entered in the hill climb in August. This trail’s about as steep as the one in the race.”

  I looked up and down the trail to see if this was true. “What month is it now?”

  “Are you some kind of nut?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s late July. July twenty-fifth, to be exact. You want the day of the week?”

  I shook my head. “That’d be too much.” He looked up at me and waited. Maybe he expected me to do something, jump and break my ankles or something. Maybe I was just an excuse for a rest stop. “How far have you run?” I asked.

  “Nine miles so far. It’s another seven from here to my car on the road, but they’re all downhill.”

  “Seven miles. I haven’t come very far.”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, but he didn’t go.

  “If you see anyone with a rifle, tell them I changed my mind and went to town.”

  He nodded. “What if I see your son?”

  “You won’t.”

  He stared at me a moment, then his hands came up and he started running in place again. “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  The blond man jogged down the hill and off my mountain.

  • • •

  Another time, another tree, ridged trunk, narrow flat leaves like a willow only it wasn’t a willow. My brain fried. I’d driven the Toyota straight through from Jackson to Rockville, Maryland, living on black coffee and orange peels, hurling the pulps onto shoulders for the mice and birds and creatures my mind created out of yellow spots that grew between the eyelid and the eye.

  Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lay a couple of hundred yards down the slope, near a more immediate funeral where serious women poured from a hearse and a couple of limousines. It seemed to be an all-girl funeral. I wondered what was the sex of the body in the casket. I wondered what sex it had been before it died. One of the women saw me in the tree and stared for a moment, then turned back to the awning and the box.

  I’d always idolized him, tried to write like him, drink like him, find a consuming woman like he did. I root for the Princeton football team. My first dog was Gatsby and the cats we live with now are Fitz and Zelda. Scott was the best and could have been the greatest. I felt underwater.

  The women lined up, facing away, all in black. One woman stood profile to me and said the words you say at these things—fertilizer to fertilizer/blank tape to blank tape—whatever they say.

  Nothing came across as solid. A line of telephone poles, the Toyota, the white building behind me with its pillars and steps, all shimmered as if seen through the top part of flames. The horizons breathed. The only spot in focus was the line of black and the woman turned sideways, looking down at something that used to be someone.

  I went to sleep and didn’t fall from the tree until after midnight.

  • • •

  The Fig Newtons were acting up in my empty stomach, causing problems not easily dealt with in a tree, and the sun pushed the shadows longer by the minute. Besides, the top of the mountain called. What an anthropomorphic thought.

  A man walked down the trail from the same direction as the jogger. He was an older man in gray khakis, a red wool shirt, and hiking boots. I couldn’t see his face because he kept it down, looking at the ground, but a rifle hung from his right hand.

  I decided to stay put.

  The man knelt and studied something on the trail—the neat’s-foot oil—then he squinted at the sun before moving toward my tree. He limped a little, taking shorter steps with his left foot than he did with the right.

  Hunting season is in October, and this guy was no hunter anyway.
He carried the rifle like a putter. His face was deep-tanned across the forehead, nothing at all like a hunter’s tan.

  He stopped below my perch and touched the dust where the jogger had run in place. Turning his head, he looked down along the trail, then over at the canyon, then behind himself, up the hill. I wondered who he was. The face seemed familiar, but way out of context, like someone from an old television commercial.

  He stood back up and leaned one hand against the aspen. Had I been Jimmy Stewart, I would have leaped from the tree, landed on his back, wrestled the rifle from his grasp, and demanded to know why he’d shot at me. Then I would have had Henry Fonda blow his face off. But I’m not Jimmy Stewart. I’m a writer and writers don’t leap from trees. They create people to jump for them.

  Besides which, this would-be killer was tracking a jogger who ran to the road, got in his car, and drove away. He would probably follow all the way into town and forget me. I hoped. Couldn’t be much of a tracker if he didn’t know a Nike sole from an Adidas. The man coughed twice, then limped slowly on down the trail.

  • • •

  Down the tree and into the woods. I walked backwards so the tracks would lead out of the forest instead of in—a cheap Max Brand trick that anyone who’d ever read a Western would catch, but this old fart didn’t look like the type to waste his time on category fiction. More likely he subscribed to Omni and Smithsonian, maybe even Dynamic Jazz Reports.

  Soon though, I fell backwards over a root. Forward again, I pushed into the deepest, darkest, most forbidding part of the forest. Afternoon suddenly turned into evening. An owl whooshed by my ear. The bushes blended together to form shadows that made strange sounds. I ducked into a westward-running gully that smelled of angry grizzlies, salivating with desire to rip the entrails from innocent intruders.

  On a narrow shelf that jutted up beside the gully floor, I unloaded the pack, built a small fire, and sat cross-legged in the dirt, watching the tops of the fir and spruce grow dark against the stars. If the old man had followed, he’d have an easy kill with me outlined by the fire, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t. Most assassins and all hit men come from cities, and no city boy, not even a killer, would follow a local into the unknown darkness. That was the theory anyway.