Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  The trip was a disappointment. Buggie caught the croup, or what Ann called croup, the cabin we rented came without hot water, the Chevelle threw a radiator hose, and, the real disappointment, Hemingway didn’t provide any answers. The bum hardly provided any waves, just a few weak hisses, more like swamp gas than immortality. I’ve always suspected that macho woman-bull-lion-killer act hid a shallow personality. Maybe his heroes showed no emotions because Hemingway had none himself. I don’t see any use in admiring a person without emotions.

  Almost a foot of slushy snow covered the grave, but that’s no excuse. If emanations can pierce the coffin and six feet of dirt, snow should be child’s play. A dead greeting card designer could vibe through a foot of snow. It may be that Hemingway used up his creativity in life—I can respect that. What good does creativity do a dead man? Still, you’d think something would be left, a few inventive ashes or something. Of course, I’m not Hemingway’s type. It could be that way down in the ground, he sensed an antihero overhead, a wimp who likes women and thinks bullfights and wars are silly, and he decided not to emit while I was in the vicinity. Figures the self-idolizer would turn into a snobby corpse.

  Still, I was disappointed. I loved my family, they made being alive mean something, but we’d been together a year and that first rush of mattering was slacking off a bit. With graduation looming in the near future, I needed some reassurance that life was more than a personal adventure. I’d decided happiness meant a lot, but I wanted something else—something bigger than love between two mortal people.

  Hemingway never was big on reassurance in his life and writing. I guess I was asking too much to expect it from him after his death.

  10

  Buggie and I lay on the floor, coloring a Bullwinkle coloring book, watching The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. On the show, a mountain lion protected a French domestic rabbit because it was pregnant. I’m not sure what the mountain lion protected the rabbit from.

  “Mine,” said Buggie, taking my crayon.

  “Okay,” I said. Neither one of us colored inside the lines very well, but I did better than the Bug. Ann sat on the couch, sewing patches in my new jeans. Neil Young wore patches on his jeans, so I wanted some on mine.

  “Why does the rabbit have such huge ears?” Ann asked.

  “It’s French,” I said. “See, the guy in the balloon is French, so the rabbit must be French too.”

  “What is a French guy in a balloon doing in the mountains?”

  “They didn’t explain that.”

  Buggie reached his hand toward a grizzly bear whose name was Ben, or, a least, the people on the show called him Ben. Buggie made clutching movements with his little fist and said, “My bet.”

  “It’s a bear, Buggie. Bears don’t make good pets.”

  “My bet.”

  Ann spoke through a needle between her teeth. “Friday was pet day at the day care. All the big kids brought animals. You should have seen Heather’s pet lima bean plant. She had a ribbon tied through its leaves.”

  Buggie looked at Ann. “Bet.”

  “Maybe we should buy him a dog,” I said. “A beagle, beagles handle kid abuse well. They’ll put up with anything and not bite.”

  “I’d rather have a cat.”

  “Cats don’t like children.” This rapidly deteriorated into a stock cats versus dogs discussion with neither side offering an opinion less than five hundred years old. Most family debates could be recorded by actors and actresses, sold in stores, and played in the tape deck whenever a disagreement occurs. That way the debaters wouldn’t have to actually participate and could use their time watching television.

  Buggie decided to ignore us and go back to coloring Bullwinkle. He grabbed my new crayon. “Mine.”

  “Hey, I get this one. You’ve got enough.”

  “Mine.”

  Ann leaned down and took my crayon. “Let him color, Loren,” she said, handing the crayon to Buggie.

  That left me with white. Who can color a white page with a white Crayola? “Look, Buggie. Don’t color the sky blue. Try green or red.”

  “Why shouldn’t he color the sky blue? The sky is blue.”

  I stole the blue crayon and Buggie started to cry. “Someone will see the drawing and think we made him color the sky blue.”

  “So?”

  “They’ll think we’re overstructuring Buggie’s education. Forcing him to deal with reality.”

  “Give him the crayon, Loren.”

  “But—”

  “The pictures all end up in the trash anyway. Who’s to see we have a structured kid?”

  Little did Ann know I stashed all Buggies’s drawings in my file box behind the unsold Western, four short stories, and my brand-new, probably never-to-be-used college diploma. I saved hundreds of Buggie’s childhood scrawlings for posterity.

  The phone rang and Ann and I looked at each other, waiting to see if the other one would get up to answer it. I won. Ann set her sewing on the end of the couch, out of Buggie’s and my reach, and went into the kitchen. I gave Buggie back the blue crayon so he’d stop crying and I could listen in on the call.

  Ann didn’t talk long, in fact, she talked hardly at all; mostly she listened. Twice I heard, “Don’t you want to talk to him?” and once, “When are you planning to do that?”

  Buggie colored the sky blue and I colored Bullwinkle’s feet white. On the TV, a tame grizzly bear tracked down the rabbit while four humans stood in a semicircle and discussed the importance of individual expression. Something in Ann’s tone on “Don’t you want to talk to him?” gave me an intense goose pimply feeling, like the pattern of the last year was turning on its head and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I always feel the change right before it happens and I never try to stop it.

  Ann came back in the living room, but she didn’t sit down. I knew the goose pimply feeling was right because she held both hands together above her elbows. Ann’s hands usually hung down, relaxed.

  “That was your stepfather,” she said.

  “Don?”

  “Is that your stepfather’s name?”

  “Yes.”

  Ann hesitated, “Your sister was killed last night.”

  I looked at Buggie. He sat, watching Ann and chewing on the crayon.

  Ann continued: “In Houston, in some kind of a race riot. He wasn’t sure of the details, but I guess a policeman accidentally shot her.”

  “Her name is Kathy.”

  “That’s what your stepfather said.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me himself?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Ann came back to the couch and sat where she could touch my shoulders. I reached over and took the crayon out of Buggie’s mouth. “Your tongue’s blue,” I said.

  “Mine,” Buggie answered.

  We sat awhile, no one doing anything. Grizzly Adams came to a happy conclusion, the rabbit had her babies. A commercial about a mother and daughter with equally soft hands took its place.

  “The funeral is Wednesday morning,” Ann said. “Your stepfather didn’t think you’d want to go.”

  “I’d like to be there.”

  She looked at me closely, “Do you want me to come?”

  I met Ann’s eyes and made a decision. “We’ll get married in Texas.”

  “Married?”

  “I mean, do you want to? I’d kind of like to get married…”

  Buggie got up and walked across the coloring book and stood between Ann’s legs, balancing himself by holding onto my hair.

  “You want to go to your sister’s funeral and, afterwards, marry me?”

  “We could get married before the funeral.”

  “Why?” She picked up the Bug and sat him in her lap. He looked at me seriously.

  “What?”

  “Why now? You neve
r mentioned marriage before. You never even mentioned having a sister before.”

  “Her name is Kathy.”

  “You said that.” Ann waited, her mouth a line, her eyes looking directly in my face. I wanted badly to read the expression, but it was ridiculous to try. Better to keep talking.

  “I suppose it’s a matter of balance. Losing one next of kin means I should add another.”

  “That’s an odd reason for getting married.”

  I touched her. “I love you and the Bug.”

  “Which do you love most?”

  Buggie seemed to be following the conversation closely, his mouth set in the same line. I realized where he came by the famous Buggie look.

  “Between you and Buggie?” Ann nodded. “That’s not a fair question. You’re one and the same to me.”

  “If Fred wasn’t here, would you still love me?”

  The question was so unthinkable that I hesitated too long. “Of course.”

  Ann nodded again. She stared at me a couple of minutes, then said, “I’ll marry you anyway.”

  • • •

  That night Buggie went climbing again. I was in the rocker, reading aloud to Buggie from a Flannery O’Connor short story book—the story about the guy who steals the ape suit so he can be somebody. Ann was washing the dishes, which may sound odd since it was my night, but I got out of the job on account of Kathy being dead. Aren’t the consequences of an action amazing? The temperature rises to 110 in Houston, so some black kids break into a True Value Hardware to steal an air conditioner, the break-in escalates into a riot, and a Texas Ranger kills my sister, and because of all this, two days later, I get out of doing the dishes.

  “You okay?” Ann asked from the kitchen.

  “Did you know that when she was five years old, Flannery O’Connor taught a chicken to walk backwards?”

  “I thought all chickens walk backwards.”

  “The Pathé News Agency filmed the trick and showed it as a short subject before movies all across America. Flannery was more famous then than when she died thirty-four years later as the greatest woman writer of all time.”

  Ann’s voice came through the sound of running water. “Was Flannery O’Connor the greatest woman writer of all time?”

  “Of course.” I was all set to launch into the standard O’Connor-versus-everyone-else rap when Buggie chose that moment to scream, “Medago,” and scamper up the living room drapes. He made about a foot and a half up the wall before the whole shebang fell on his head. Ann ran in from the kitchen, Buggie cried like his world was canceled, I stood around, hoping Ann wouldn’t blame me and say Buggie climbed the drapes to get attention because she was washing dishes. Be just like her to swear off housework so as not to threaten the kid.

  Ann’s only comment was “Jeez Louise, Loren, keep an eye on him.”

  “I was reading, he went up in a flash.”

  Buggie quit howling and picked up the curtain rod. He swung it back over his head like a baseball bat, then forward until it pointed at my desk. “Biggin,” he said. He patiently watched the end of the rod awhile, then swung it again, making a boosh gurgly sound in the back of his mouth.

  “Where’d he learn how to fish?” Ann asked.

  “Is he fishing?”

  “Didn’t you hear him?”

  Buggie looked at me seriously and said, “Biggin.”

  To quote Buggie phonetically, most of his sentences would read like Igawdoepahrum. No one except Ann and I understood a word he said, and I faked it much of the time. When Buggie cooed, “Burwazzahassie,” I nodded and smiled and said things like “Is that so, then what happened?” I always figured Ann did the same, but now I don’t know. Maybe she understood all those grunts and slurs.

  I tied a four-foot length of curtain cord onto the end of the rod and Buggie went “biggin” all evening. The kid had a tremendous attention span. It’s like he was born to obsession.

  All the way to Texas, Buggie sat in his safety chair in back and fished over the front seat between Ann and me. About every five minutes, he hollered, “Biggin,” and hit me in the right ear with the rod or cord. He never hit Ann, only me.

  Buggie’s technique caused our first real argument. He didn’t reel in the line—just sat watching the rod for several minutes before pepping me in the ear on the backswing. North of Raton, New Mexico, I decided this was all wrong. Pulling onto the shoulder, I turned to face Buggie in the backseat.

  “You’re casting like a bait fisherman.”

  Ann was working a crossword puzzle and didn’t understand why we stopped. “What?”

  I took the rod from Buggie’s hand. “Here, wave it back and forth. Pretend it’s a floating, double-tapered line with a barbless size twelve Royal Humpy on a 4X leader. Two false casts, then let it down easy.”

  Considering we were in a ’63 Chevelle, I showed pretty good form. “See,” I said.

  The Bug’s lower lip shot out and his eyes watered.

  “Give him the fishing pole,” Ann said.

  “We must establish proper habits,” I said. “He’s casting like a bait fisherman.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Only germs use worms. Now, Buggie, you try it.” I handed the rod back to the kid. He howled and threw it on the floor.

  Ann blamed me, of course. “Jesus.” She twisted around and reached over the backseat floor. “Look what you’ve done, Loren. He was perfectly fine. Do you know how hard it is to keep a two-year-old perfectly fine on a long trip?”

  Buggie howled louder.

  “My brother will be at the funeral. Do you want him to think I’m raising a worm watcher?”

  “I don’t give a shit what he thinks.” Ann pulled up the rod and stuck it in Buggie’s hands. He stuck out his lower lip, then threw the rod back on the floor.

  “You don’t care?” Ann hardly ever said shit, so when she did, the word carried a lot of power.

  Ann turned from Buggie to look at me. “Oh, Loren, of course I want your brother to like us, but if he bases his like or dislike on how Buggie swings a curtain rod, there’s not much I can do.”

  Buggie suddenly stopped crying. He didn’t sniffle twice or suck air or any of the regular signs of stopping crying. He went from full-blast screamer to quiet all in one instant.

  “Okay,” I said, “I won’t make a big thing.”

  “You already did.”

  “Do you mind if we camp by a river tonight so I can show him a few casts? Is that all right?”

  In mid-nod, Ann remembered something, “Brother? We’re together over a year without you mentioning a sister, now there’s a brother? How big is this family anyway?”

  “Two brothers and a sister—well, she’s dead, so I guess I shouldn’t count her anymore. Also a mom and a stepdad.” That made four left if I counted Don. “Garrett won’t be at the funeral. He’s in jail in Reidsville, Georgia.”

  Ann reached down on the backseat floor and retrieved the fishing pole again. “Why’s that?” Buggie looked at the pole a moment, torn between his principles and his toys. The toy won; he took the curtain rod.

  “He was in Vietnam and came back dependent. One week it’s heroin, the next week Jesus, sometimes both at once. He got caught in a heroin phase and sent to prison for twelve years.”

  “Which side is he on now?”

  “Jesus, last I heard, but that was awhile back.”

  As I turned to start the Chevelle, Buggie swung the rod side-armed and caught me full in the temple. “Digaloot—fishin,” he said.

  • • •

  I didn’t tell Ann the story of my other brother, Patrick. He’s the oldest. Patrick enrolled in a special school to learn how to win friends and influence people. He used to stand on a chair and shout, “I’m enthusiastic.” Whenever he met someone he would repeat their name three times in con
versation so he knew the names of everyone he knew.

  Patrick met a girl from El Paso named Libby. The weekend Patrick and Libby announced their engagement, they went water-skiing on Lake Texhoma and Libby skied into a big ball of water moccasins. While Patrick watched, the snakes wrapped around her arms and legs and life preserver and killed her.

  When I left Victoria, Patrick was selling real estate for a company that was draining a swamp where the last whooping cranes on earth used to lay their eggs. He drank often and watched professional sports on TV. He never stood on a chair, shouting, “I’m enthusiastic,” anymore.

  • • •

  Ann and I were married by a justice of the peace in Borger, Texas, on August 5, 1976. The JP’s face looked like an aerial photograph of a Panhandle dirt farm. His wife, the witness, had hair the color and texture of a brand new S.O.S. pad. She pronounced Ann with two syllables and Loren with one. Before the ceremony, she licked a Tennessee Ernie Ford spiritual album clean, set it on pearl-colored monaural record player, and played “The Old Rugged Cross.” I liked the sound.

  Ann wore a white blouse and new jeans and carried Buggie on her right hip. Buggie wore Pampers. He carried his fishing pole in both hands, casting it occasionally at the JP. I forget what I wore, probably whatever I had on when we pulled into town. My lip was all swollen from a giant canker sore that Ann said broke out because I wasn’t releasing the pain of Kathy’s death.

  “Stop internalizing,” she said. “Let the emotion flow. Holding back only causes ulcers and strokes.”

  “I can’t decide what emotion I feel.”

  “Pick one and let it out.”

  I picked anger and let it out by shaking my fist at the back of the first Texas Ranger who drove past, but the canker sore only spread.

  The judge acted as if I was peculiar because I didn’t have a ring to give Ann. Ann didn’t seem to mind. She smiled and cheek-kissed the judge and his wife after the ceremony. Ann’s lips came away from the woman’s cheek light blue and dusted with something chalky.

  We honeymooned outside Borger on brown Lake Meredith so Buggie could throw his cord in the water and I could visit the Texas Panhandle Pueblo Culture National Monument. I wanted to see what kind of waves emitted from people who had been dead several thousand years. None of those Pueblos must have been creative writers because I didn’t feel a thing but hot.