Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  All through the meal Buggie was the model of babyhood, happy, laughing, playful when I wanted playful, quiet when I wanted quiet. Ann gave him a bowl of spaghetti and sauce which he turned into the most endearing mess I ever saw. You’d think he was a trained boy.

  “Is Buggie his real name?”

  “Fred.”

  “Fred?”

  “Fred Blue Smith.”

  “No wonder you call him Buggie. How old is he?”

  “A year next week. The day-care kids are giving him a party, aren’t they, my little Bugaroo?” Buggie slapped his hand into the spaghetti bowl.

  I drank some wine, wondering how I got so far into life without seeing this side of things. They seemed to fit so easily and comfortably together, playing at eating, watching each other for signs of mood. Will he eat another bite if I pretend the spoon is an airplane? Will she be mad if I throw my cup overboard?

  • • •

  We talked about Denver and my school and her day care and what Krazy Glue does if you eat it. She told me she’d never married Buggie’s father. Never even thought about it. I told her I was going to write a book someday. We finished her bottle and opened mine. For once, I found a woman I could relax around without worrying whether or not she wanted to be somewhere else. Ann seemed content to sit at the table drinking wine and talking.

  After supper, Buggie and I went back to the couch to play funny sounds while Ann cleared the dishes.

  “I’ll just soak them,” she said. “I don’t feel like washing right now.”

  “I never feel like washing dishes.”

  Ann put a Joni Mitchell album on the cheap stereo and we sat on the couch, holding hands, while Buggie crawled around, exploring under all the cribs and baby beds.

  “You want to smoke a joint?” I asked.

  “Wine’s fine for me, but you go ahead.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll drink and sit here with you.”

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  We talked some more and I found myself explaining why John Steinbeck wrote good books on the West Coast and bad books on the East Coast. The theory was pretty weak and I don’t know how I got started on it, but Ann acted interested. At least she nodded her head at pertinent points and asked reasonable questions. I talked a good deal more than I generally do, but even as I raved on like an imbecile, I was thinking that anyone interested in this drivel must be my perfect match. Or so starved for human contact she’d listen to anything. Right in the middle of my comparison of The Winter of Our Discontent to Of Mice and Men, Ann leaned over and kissed me.

  “What’s that for?”

  “You had it coming.”

  Buggie crawled over and up on Ann’s lap, where he collapsed. One second he was reaching for her wineglass, gurgling his little heart out, the next second he nestled into her breasts and fell asleep. I followed Ann to one of the cribs, where she lay Buggie down and undressed him like a rag doll. Ann stuck her finger in his diaper. “You sure are cooperating tonight,” she said to the sleeping Buggie.

  “No Krazy Glue?”

  “No nothing. Dry as the desert.”

  She pulled a blue blanket up to Buggie’s chin, then stood back to admire her creation. I put my arm around her and together we watched him sleep. With Ann so small against me, I felt protective—as if I was a piece of something that mattered. There’s nothing more emotional than a sleeping child being watched by his mother.

  Ann turned over the Joni Mitchell and we retired to the couch, where I kissed her. “That feels nice,” she murmured, kissing back. The kissing and hugging felt natural, not frenzied, nobody pushed the ritual or turned animal or anything. We held each other awhile, then kissed awhile, then lay back to relax and think about it awhile. The best thing was the lack of paranoia. Am I getting into something I can’t handle? Does she want what I want? Will there be aftereffects? None of that meant anything compared to feeling good with Ann on the couch.

  The album ended and Ann got up to put on another one, a jazzy instrumental I wasn’t familiar with.

  Back next to me, Ann mumbled again, “This sure feels nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t usually…”

  “Yeah.”

  My hands roved and explored, we started kissing more than relaxing and thinking, clothes hit the floor one at a time, and soon we reached the point where it’s very difficult to turn back.

  “Do you need, uh?”

  “I have an IUD.”

  “Yeah?”

  Buggie woke with a scream.

  I stopped. “You think he crapped the tube?”

  “No, Buggie doesn’t like men to touch me. Don’t worry, he’s okay.”

  “But he’s yelling his head off.”

  “Loren, please don’t stop. Buggie just feels threatened. He’s got to learn there’s more to my life than him.” Ann squirmed under me, pulling me into her.

  I entered for about two seconds and Buggie’s screaming doubled. “He sounds hurt.”

  “He’s fine. Lie still and he’ll go back to sleep.” I lay on Ann, in Ann, not moving. After a bit, the Bug quietened down some and she risked a few timid hip thrusts. As soon as I moved, though, the crying rose with a wail. Buggie stood in his crib, holding the side, tears streaming down his red face.

  “I don’t think I can continue.”

  Ann grabbed my back. “You can’t stop now.”

  “But he’s going to rupture something.”

  “Hold on.” She pushed me off and ran naked to the crib. “No tube,” she said. Picking up the baby, she scampered back and settled into the couch next to me. “He won’t feel threatened if I hold him.”

  “Is there room for all three of us?”

  “Sure, put your legs here. You’ll have to prop on your elbows some. There. If he cries, pet him and tell him it’s okay. It’ll work. He likes you.”

  “Pet Buggie while I’m pumping you?”

  “It’ll work. I’ve done this before.”

  So. Buggie sat on Ann’s chest between her breasts, facing me, looking quite serious about the business. Ann pulled me back in and we were off. The position worked so long as my eyes stayed open and on Buggie. Whenever I got a little carried away and picked up the tempo or touched Ann with one of my hands, his eyes filled with tears and his little mouth popped open. I slowed down and stroked him and said, “Good baby. It’s okay. I’m not hurting your mama. Everything’s fine.”

  Buggie’s face held a mixture of trust and fear, that look I was to see a thousand times in the years to come. I can still see it in front of me. His brows are down and his mouth spreads in a line. His eyes turn pitiful. Imagine the look of a puppy right before your father drowns it.

  Meanwhile, down under the menfolk, Ann writhed and moaned and had wonderful sex. She came a few times, I popped with an “Ugh,” and Buggie leaned forward and pulled on my ear.

  Over a period of time, until the wedding actually, we faced this crisis two or three times a week. Sometimes, if we stayed real quiet, Buggie slept through it. Once we hired a baby-sitter and fooled around upstairs in my place, but, on the whole, sex with Ann involved fucking her body while looking in Buggie’s eyes. God only knows what this did to the stepfather-baby relationship.

  I know I didn’t feel perverted or incestuous or anything else distasteful, at least not at the time. From Buggie’s point of view, I don’t know what it did. He was very young and couldn’t have remembered this strange form of love later when he grew old enough to be scarred by grown-ups. I don’t know, though. He must have been affected in some way.

  • • •

  The next morning the silver Krazy Glue tube appeared in Buggie’s pamper. “Looks like a Cracker Jack prize,” I said. “He digested the paint. You think the glue still sticks?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

&nb
sp; “I’ll hide it somewhere safer this time.”

  I decided to take Ann and Buggie to the Oak Avenue Cemetery for a picnic. A poet named Peter Pym had died of alcohol abuse the month before and I wanted to check his emanations, though I didn’t mention to Ann that the purpose of the picnic was to stand on a grave.

  What I said was, “It’s a beautiful day, let’s go walk around the cemetery.”

  Not missing a beat, Ann answered, “Should I pack some food? Buggie gets hungry if he doesn’t eat every two hours. How do you feel about cucumbers?”

  Normally I don’t care much for poets, dead or alive. They’re a little pithy for me—all sensitivity and no attention span. However, Peter Pym was the Western Shakespeare, only poet ever elected to the Cowboy Hall of Fame. He was rumored to have appeared in four Tom Mix movies and been narrowly edged out of the original Sons of the Pioneers.

  It was Peter Pym who wrote “The Cowboy’s Melody.”

  With a ten-dollar horse and a forty-dollar saddle

  I’ll soon be down in Texas a-punchin’ on the cattle.

  Without saying why, I dragged Ann and Buggie back and forth across the cemetery three times before I found the marker, and then he put out all the aura of a fresh cow patty on a cold day. Personally, I don’t think Peter Pym wrote “The Cowboy’s Melody.” I think he stole it.

  We spread the quilt between Peter and Mary Louise Wolfe (1904-1972). Some interesting vibes rose from Mary’s dirt, along the lines of a faithful sixty-year diary keeper, but I figured I better not investigate until later. Finding and standing over Peter Pym had been plenty for Ann to witness before lunch.

  Ann had packed a real picnic basket with cucumber sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs with the yolks pulled out, then spiced up, and somehow crammed back in again. She’d made a spinach salad with vinegar and oil dressing and an apricot mush thing for Buggie. We drank iced Mellow Mint tea and ate strawberries dipped in brown sugar for dessert. I’d never been on a picnic with a picnic basket before. In Texas we used brown paper sacks.

  Winter in Denver is long and cold, followed by a spring short and slushy. That Saturday in the cemetery was the first dry, clear day since October. Maybe being with Ann and Buggie made me notice more than I’d been noticing lately, but it seemed as if the trees were greener and the telephone poles higher than I remembered. The gravestones reflected light so brightly I wished I’d brought my clip-on sunglasses. Mostly, though, I didn’t look at the gravestones. Mostly, I looked at Ann and Buggie.

  The grass fascinated Buggie. Imagine discovering lawns for the first time—what it must have felt like to sit on the corner of the quilt and lean over to touch the giant green carpet that seemed to cover the world. At first, he didn’t trust it. He stared at the grass, then at Ann, then back at the grass. Finally, he tipped over onto his hands and knees and edged forward a bit. When Buggie completely cleared the blanket, he stopped and looked at Ann and smiled.

  “Go for it,” she said.

  Buggie muttered some baby language and took off at a fast crawl.

  Ann lay sideways on the blanket, kind of simmering in the sunshine. Every time I looked at her I saw something new that I liked. First, the hips, they were nice, not fat, but the perfect size for balancing babies. Then I noticed the little double dimple that appeared on her chin when she smiled. Those dents raised Ann above cute to pretty.

  We held hands and watched a man on a backhoe dig a grave down the hill a ways. What the man was doing didn’t seem to have any connection to anything we’d ever do. Ann rolled onto her stomach, propped on her arms, facing Buggie. “He’s going to walk any day now,” she said. “The principles are down, all he needs is balance.”

  The kid was close. He clutched the side of Mary Louise Wolfe and pulled himself upright. Releasing his hold, Buggie stood alone, swaying, but unsupported.

  “Come on, Buggie,” Ann said. “Come to Mama.”

  “You can do it, Bug,” I said. “Let’s see you dance.”

  Carefully he put one foot out, lurched forward a step, wavered, and crashed on his face, laughing. I moved to go help, but Ann touched my arm. “Let him do it.”

  Buggie crawled back to the gravestone and pulled himself up again. We gave encouragement again, “Come on, Buggie. You can do it, Buggie,” and he crashed again. You’ve got to give credit to the little guy, falling on his face didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.

  While Buggie tottered off among the plots, I got Ann to talking some and she told me her life’s story so far.

  “It’s not very original,” she said.

  “I bet it’s nothing like mine.”

  She was raised in a big frame house in Coos Bay, Oregon, where it rains all the time, in a family of seven kids. When she was about nine, her mom developed colon cancer and took five miserable years in dying, so Ann couldn’t remember much about her except the helplessness.

  “They kept her so doped on painkillers she used to pass out in the lawn chair and my little brother and I had to carry her in,” Ann said. “Toward the end, her hair fell out and she lost a lot of weight. She crapped through a hole over her hip. It was kind of sad.”

  What could I say? All my tragedies had been self-inflicted. I couldn’t comprehend what it would feel like to have something bad happen.

  Ann’s father dropped off the deep end after her mom’s death. He drank too much, lost his sales job, and took to blaming his tragic life on government bureaucracy and ethnic minorities—especially Jews. He kept a pistol in the glove compartment. Once when Ann was with him, he fired at a Cadillac driver who cut him off on the freeway.

  He never forgave Ann for growing up, or maybe he was mad because she lived and her mom didn’t, Ann wasn’t sure. All she knew was her father became very angry and stopped talking to her about the time she went through puberty. In Ann’s mind, her father’s hatred and the menstrual cycle were somehow connected. Her periods always brought on guilt.

  “Didn’t all this screw you up?” I asked.

  She watched Buggie pull plastic flowers from the base of a stone. “I don’t think so. Everybody comes from a weird past. That doesn’t give you an excuse to be crazy.”

  “Does me.”

  Sickness, anger, and depression made dreary surroundings for a teenage girl, so when Ann met a group of smiling, serene religious fanatics chanting on the beach, she took off and joined the sect.

  “They were happy and all I wanted was to be happy.”

  Buggie crawled back, dragging a plastic flower between his legs. He handed it to Ann, who was so pleased she wiped off most of the dirt and stuck the flower in her hair above her ear. It was a blue flower with yellow spots in the center.

  “I dropped out of high school to follow the guru to Boulder,” she said. “He put me to work in the Divine Light Mission Day Care Center. That’s where I found out how much I enjoy taking care of kids.”

  “You were in a cult?”

  “Almost two years. It wasn’t bad. I was too young to deal with drugs and easy sex. Religion was the healthy alternative.”

  “Did you eat brown rice and tofu?”

  Ann laughed, and Buggie looked up to see the cause. “Constantly. I still can’t stand the smell of soy sauce.”

  “I’m liking you more all the time. Why’d you leave the cult?”

  Ann shrugged. Her hair fell across her shoulders and glinted off her breasts. I like what sunshine does to clean hair. “Grew up, I guess. I got disenchanted with the Maharaj Ji. He was supposed to be fourteen, but he drove a yellow Rolls-Royce. He watched cartoons on a big-screen color TV all day and ate like a pig. I can’t see worshiping a fat little boy.” She touched my shoulder. “That’s why I liked you when I first saw you carrying those stacks of books to your car. I go for thin.”

  “I’m not thin on purpose.”

  “Buggie’s wet. Hand me that bag.”

  “You
going to change his diaper?”

  “That’s what you do when the baby gets wet.” On his back, Buggie squirmed like an upside-down turtle, his legs and arms thrashing the air. Ann leaned way over so he could play with her hair while she tore open the sticky tabs.

  “I need a diaper lesson. Thamu Kamala gave me a hard time yesterday because I couldn’t change Jason or Jesse or somebody.”

  “Thamu Kamala gives everyone a hard time. Her mom’s a sect dropout like me, but her dad still wears purple robes and carries an invisible torch whenever he leaves the ashram. They split her every other week. I think Thamu Kamala’s growing up confused.”

  Ann pulled the dirty diaper off Buggie and stuffed it into a plastic bag. Lifting his feet, she went to work on his bottom with a washcloth.

  “What happened after you left the cult?”

  “Nothing much, I drifted here to Denver and hung around the freaks in Cheeseman Park. Lived a couple of years with a guy who made turquoise jewelry and sold barbiturates. That one ended badly.”

  “What happened?”

  “See, you slip the diaper under him quickly and flip this part up. Otherwise, you’ll get a face full of pee.”

  “What happened to the downs seller?”

  “One night he felt frustrated and ate too many of his own barbs. You know what that means.”

  “He beat you up.”

  “I moved into the apartment I have now and opened my own day care. Rebounded around some and wound up pregnant.”

  Her hands zoomed over Buggie, tucking, straightening folds. Just like that, he was dry, freshly diapered, rolled back onto his hands and knees, and ready to take on the world again. Smiling, Ann watched him scoot off across the lawn.

  “Where’s Buggie’s father?”

  “Chuck got himself killed the day Buggie was born. It’s real freaky. He called the hospital and said he would be right over, he still wanted me to marry him. He kept thinking when I actually saw the baby I’d break down and say yes, but I wouldn’t have. Chuck was a nice enough guy, but not somebody to marry. You’ve got to be in love to get married, you know.”

  “Got to?”