Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  Ann gave me meaningful eye contact. “I would never marry anyone without both of us being in love.” She let me think about this a minute before continuing: “Anyway, he never showed up and the next day I read in the paper he’d been shot dead in the hospital parking lot. Isn’t that weird? In broad daylight, in South Denver.”

  The story made me nervous. Death and grief were experiences I’d managed to miss up to that point, and here, lying next to me on an old quilt, sipping iced herbal tea and watching her child toddle, was a true death and grief authority. We’d made love, after a fashion. I liked her. It was too late to avoid involvement even if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to—I didn’t think—but there’s something disheartening about initiating a relationship with a woman who’s been surrounded by disaster all her life. That stuff wears off on people.

  “Sounds like you haven’t had a lot of breaks,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “All those terrible things that happened to you. Don’t you ever feel cheated by life?”

  Ann looked at me strangely, as if she’d never thought about it on those terms. “I’ve been real fortunate,” she said. “I’m healthy and I have Buggie. I love the day-care kids.” She smiled again. “Now, if you stick around a while, life will be pretty much complete.”

  I thought about me sticking around a while as a means of making her life complete. I’d only known Ann one day and hadn’t dwelt on the future yet, but the longer I watched Ann watch Buggie, the better the idea sounded. Loren Paul and his family. What an interesting phrase.

  9

  My romances tend to move with speed. Ann and I met on a Friday afternoon, by Saturday night we were “going steady” as she put it, Sunday I moved my toothbrush and hookah downstairs, and on Monday morning Ann poured cream in my coffee without being asked and told me to pick up formula on my way home from school. One moment we were blitzed by that first rush of new love, and the next time I looked around, we were sunk belly deep in a comfortable rut. Or stability, depending on how you look at it.

  The new life felt considerably better than the old one had, so I stayed with it, never stopping long enough to wonder if there might be more than just this way or that way. Throughout the years, both before and after Ann, I’ve never been able to see more than two choices at a time. This simplifies decision making, but Lana Sue says my narrowness of options causes me to make mistakes. I think I would make mistakes no matter how many choices I was given.

  I know exactly why I felt better with the new life than I had with the old one. We’re coming up on an important point here: Pre-Ann and Buggie, I had a poor outlook. I thought people are born, we hang around a few years pretending it will last forever, either we breed or we don’t, we consume more than we create or we don’t. Mostly we’re miserable and every once in a while we aren’t, but whether it’s a tenth-week termination or 106 years down the line, sooner or later we all disappear. So what?

  With that attitude it’s no wonder I watched I Love Lucy and smoked dope all day. The little I managed to pull off was motivated by the unpleasantness of the alternatives. School beat work, so I stayed in school. Being alive put off the disappearance, so I did what had to be done to stay alive.

  And then—drum roll—Buggie swallowed a tube of Krazy Glue. Suddenly something mattered. Something has to matter. Otherwise, a person’s life will be miserable and empty. Am I the last one to figure that out? The what that matters is unimportant—God, Coke-bottle collecting, track and field—all are equally useful in staving off the uselessness. For my stepfather, Don, bowling matters. Napoleon wanted to conquer Russia. Lana Sue’s mom thinks the quality of her life is directly dependent on the meat prices at Kroger’s. Career and love life may be a little trite, but they seem to work as well as anything.

  To someone on the outside, your basis may look like a joke, but if you know it’s important, really know and go on knowing, you’ll never fall into despair.

  After all those years of neoexistential pouting, I awoke Monday morning caring about something. Driving in to class on the I-45 loop, I seriously worried about Buggie’s diet, Ann’s reproductive organs, my future. Within a week, I started writing a book. No matter what Sartre, Camus, or Vonnegut says, a man with no future does not write a book.

  I enjoyed making love in the glow of TV light and the wave that swept over me when I awoke early and watched Ann’s face asleep on the pillow next to me. Those first few weeks were an orgy of touching, meaningful moments that made me sick with love. However, it was the smaller rushes, the day-to-day routines, that gave me the powerful something-matters feeling I had always wanted—pushing Buggie in a grocery cart down the aisles in Food Lion, sorting socks next to Ann at the Laundromat, holding Buggie while she swabbed his ear with a warmed Bermuda onion when he had an infection—that’s when I felt life was worth the trouble even if it has to end.

  Another rule: A woman who makes laundry day fun is a woman to keep.

  The semester ended in a flurry of B minuses and C pluses. Summer loomed as a long, easy three months of warmth, family, and regular sex—or the summer would have loomed if I’d had any money. The only job I could find was breakfast-lunch dishwasher at the Hard Wok Cafe on East Colfax. I like Chinese people. Remember that. My body does not contain a single ethnically prejudiced bone, but Jesus Christ, it’s unnatural to expect someone to eat rice and bok choy before 8:00 a.m. Our breakfast special was jellied lamb loaf. Try jellied lamb loaf with your first cup of coffee some morning and see if you don’t resent our little Oriental brothers.

  And all the cooks, waiters, and busboys spoke nothing to each other but Chinese. Fast Chinese, like they’d gone to the Ho Chi School of Speed Speaking. They had so much energy and, at that time of day, I had so little, I felt like a 33 1/3 man in a 78 world.

  I wrote my first Western in the Hard Wok kitchen. Professional dishwashing is a great job for mental retards or soaring philosophers because you must be either so far below the work that it constitutes a challenge, or so far above it that the drama is all in your brain and your bodily actions can be ignored. To those hyper cooks banging wok tools and singing “At the Copa” in Chinese unison, I may have appeared to be scraping, spraying, shoving, sorting, and stacking, but in actuality my Jackson Sterilizer dishmachine and I were in 1882 Bitter Creek, Wyoming, defending goodness and fistfighting bad men with livid facial scars.

  Except that they drank, fought, and chased women endlessly, all my characters were stolen directly from Andy Griffith TV show reruns. Usually I played Andy’s parts and the Jackson Sterilizer was Barney, but sometimes we’d switch and he’d be Gomer while I played Opie. The garbage disposal played the role of Ernest T. Bass. We blocked out every scene, experimenting with dialogue, going over the fights and shootouts one instant at a time.

  At 2:30, I sped home, took the stairs to my apartment two steps at a bound, and typed furiously for an hour before my mind wandered and I lost the lines that sounded so bright and clear in the steam of my Sterilizer. The book was about a sheriff with bad manners and good intentions and a woman the other way around. The sympathetic whore with the heart of gold acted suspiciously like Aunt Bee, and Floyd shot himself every time he picked up a gun, but, as a cheap Western, I thought the book worked, sort of.

  Typing done, I reread the previous day’s work, fixing blatant inconsistencies, like the heroine’s eyes that kept changing color and the bad guys whose names were never the same two chapters in a row. After that, I watched a real Andy Griffith rerun, taking notes of course, and waited for the moms in their Volkswagen bugs and buses to carry away all the little Jesses and Heathers downstairs. Around 5:30, Ann knocked on the ceiling twice with a mop handle and I answered with a hiking boot. Then I trotted downstairs for an evening of quiet domesticity.

  • • •

  I decided it would be fun if Buggie’s first words were multi-syllabled and significant. His biographer would love me for it.
For two weeks, I debated between “environmental action” and “Spare change, mister,” finally opting for “transcendental.”

  “Transcendental,” I said seven thousand times.

  “Agwahk,” Buggie answered.

  My job was to sit Buggie in his high chair and feed him supper while Ann worked on our own dinner, which by then had become the big event of the day.

  “Open up,” I quacked in my duck voice, shoveling in what I could from a Flintstones bowl of lentil-barley soup. I cleanly shaved the spit-out off his chin with the spoon. In two months, I’d become a whiz at the father skills. I cleaned, fed, entertained, and when I wanted, ignored the baby as well as any sperm daddy around. Didn’t even retch at peeling off a diarrhea-filled diaper. I call that commitment.

  “Transcendental,” I said.

  Buggie reached for the soup bowl, but I saved it. “Transcendental,” I said again.

  “He’s not a parrot,” Ann said.

  “Transcendental.”

  Ann moved around the stove, throwing vegetables and spices into a Dutch oven on one of the burners. “I wish you wouldn’t treat him like a pet.”

  “He’s a genius. Did you see him playing baby in a coma the other night?” Buggie shook his head from side to side, daring me to stick soup in his mouth.

  “I saw you feeding him chocolate kisses when he got it right. The sugar kept him up all night.”

  “Transcendental,” I said. I reached over and pinched Buggie’s little nostrils together. After a moment’s resistance, his mouth opened and I popped in a spoonful of soup.

  Ann stirred whatever it was with a ladle. I loved suppertime best of all—the three of us together, doing small important jobs. My kind of peaceful.

  “He’s not a dog,” Ann said.

  “I know. He can’t learn to bark. Transcendental.”

  “I mean it, Loren.”

  Buggie spit out the mouthful of soup he’d been saving. I’ve seen that kid hold stuff in his mouth for hours before blabbing it out at an inappropriate moment.

  “I just want the Bug to know the things that were important to me as a boy. I didn’t have a dad to teach me tricks.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as…I want to show Buggie how to hitchhike and panhandle in parks.”

  “Loren.”

  “Real soon I’m going to teach him to roll reefers. He’ll be the best year-old reefer roller in Colorado.”

  “You better be kidding.”

  “Buggie’ll be the hit of every party. I’ll buy a home movie camera and film him and send it off to Hollywood.”

  Ann turned clear around. “Loren, Fred is my son. Not yours.”

  “I forget sometimes.”

  “Write it down. He’s my son and he’s a person, not a pet.”

  “A person, not a pet.”

  Buggie lunged forward, arms at full extension, and pushed the soup onto the floor. The bowl landed right side up and spun around and round, showing first Dino, then Barney, then Pebbles.

  I said, “Transcendental.”

  • • •

  A week later, in the parking lot at Wendy’s, Buggie made a fist at a Jeep CJ5 and said, “Car,” just plain as could be.

  Another couple of weeks, he learned Mama, TV, me, and trouble. I don’t remember the little punk ever saying “transcendental.”

  • • •

  After supper we usually sat around and read or watched television until bedtime. The first couple of weeks I lay on the couch a lot, smoking pot, but that gradually lost its charm. Getting stoned alone with someone is different from getting stoned alone alone. There isn’t much use. I had more fun chasing Buggie around the living room. Once he learned to walk, Buggie moved quickly on to running, then constant running.

  He ran like a monkey, with both hands over his head, but not like a kid because he didn’t squeal and shout. Whoever heard of a child playing tag without making noise? I’d chase him left around a baby bed, then cut back right to head him off, and he’d scoot under the bed and over an arm of the couch. Buggie wasn’t very fast—he was only one—but he had the concentration of an athlete, say a pole-vaulter or a gymnast. I almost hated to end the game by catching him.

  When bedtime finally arrived, I would grab him around the waist and, as I carried Buggie upside down to his baby bed under the mobile of plastic farm animals, he always looked up at me over his bottom lip with that what-did-I-do-to-get-treated-this-way face. Maybe he thought night-night was punishment for allowing me to catch him.

  While Buggie and I played, Ann busied around, scissoring figures for the felt board storytime or glueing glitter and poking holes in poster paper. Most nights she practiced songs from a book that showed hand signal accompaniments. Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout, that sort of thing. To me, it takes at least two grown-ups to handle one child. Four—divorced real parents and new stepmoms and -dads—works even better. But Ann took care of ten. And me. Imagine that.

  She didn’t talk much about her business. In fact, Ann didn’t talk much about anything, and because of that, I took a long time getting to know her. We never worked out those subtle signals that husbands and wives who have lived together for years use to get across what they really mean in spite of what they say.

  “Would you care to leave the party, dear?”

  “Oh, I don’t care, honey, it’s up to you.”

  A long-term mate should know whether that particular “I don’t care” means yes, no, or I don’t care, but with Ann, I never knew for certain what she meant, so I had to act on the literal value. Acting on the literal value can cause a lot of misunderstanding.

  Another thing I couldn’t catch on to was her thought process. How she chose a movie or why she decided on waffles one morning and oatmeal the next. Ann told me she was satisfied with us and that was all that counted for her, but I wanted to know why she was satisfied so I could do something to keep her that way.

  What Ann and I did mostly that summer was make each other happy. Which is a lot to claim. We went from not being together to being together so fast, it’s hard to believe that real love was involved. I felt like I loved her, believed I loved her, but how real can love be with someone you hardly know? Love or not, we caused happiness in each other, and I don’t think either Ann or I had been happy for as long as a summer before. Besides, look at all the loving couples out there who feel miserable most of the time. Given a choice between love and happiness, I go with happiness. Love might come along later.

  • • •

  For my birthday in August, Thamu Kamala and her mom, Joyce, came over to sit with Buggie so Ann could take me out to dinner. Buggie and I were playing crocodile and the kid when Thamu Kamala marched through the door. Crocodile and the kid involves me slithering around on the rug while Buggie throws couch cushions at my head.

  “Mom’s parking the car,” Thamu Kamala said.

  “Come on in, we’re playing a game.”

  She stood in the doorway, glaring at me on the floor. “Look at you, wallowing like an animal. Buggie must think he’s trapped with a fool.”

  I sat up. “That’s some vocabulary for a five-year-old kid.”

  Thamu Kamala went into her familiar hands on the hips routine. “I have an IQ of one-sixty-one, which makes me a genius. So there.”

  “Okay, genius, let’s work out a truce. We both like Ann, right? We both spend a lot of time in her apartment. I think we should try to be friends.”

  Thamu Kamala tossed her hair as contemptuously as a woman twenty years her senior. “I’d rather be dead.”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “What’s a possibility?” Ann asked, coming in from the bedroom. She wore her best long skirt and a white blouse with strings tied around the sleeves. Her earrings were gold dangles that I hadn’t seen before.

  “Your boy
friend threatened to kill me.”

  “Don’t threaten to kill Thamu Kamala.” Ann bent to pluck Buggie from the couch. She held him high and swung him around and across her shoulder. Every time I saw those two together I turned all emotional inside.

  Joyce came in the door dressed like a Gypsy fortune-teller. “Who’d you threaten to kill, Loren?” Her eye makeup was excessive and the black fingernail polish overstated the style a bit, but I liked Joyce. I admire any single mother who’s cheerful.

  Thamu Kamala hid behind her mother’s sparkly, full skirt. “He threatened to kill me. We should call the police and have Loren hauled away.”

  “I didn’t threaten to kill your daughter.”

  Joyce smiled, open and friendly, as if she believed me instead of Thamu Kamala. “Her father’s been reading her a book on child abuse among the nonspiritual,” she said.

  “That explains everything.”

  Joyce laughed and turned to Ann. “You sure look pretty tonight, that’s a beautiful skirt.”

  Ann straightened the waistline. “You really think so? I’ve been deciding what to wear all week. Every stitch I own is clean and ironed in case I change my mind at the last minute.”

  I wished I’d been the one to say Ann looked nice, but by then it was too late. My only recourse was to play the efficient young family man. “We’ll be home by two at the latest. Numbers are next to the phone. If he cries give him juice, bedtime is seven-thirty, and…and…” I ran out of instructions.

  Joyce looked impressed. “My, my,” she said to Ann, “you’ve trained this one well. Thamu Kamala’s father was too cosmic to be bothered by bedtime.”

  Ann came up and put her arm around me. “I’ve got a winner, all right. Pop’s in the refrigerator, cookies in the cookie jar.”

  “We’ll be fine. Where are you two lovebirds planning to dine?”

  Ann smiled at the word lovebirds. “Los Gatos. I heard they have a band. Wouldn’t that be nice? Live music makes a place feel so fancy.”

  Single moms will talk all night if someone doesn’t put a stop to it. I looked at my wrist, pretending I wore a watch. “Ann, hon, my birthday will be over soon.”