Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  They couldn’t have been too awfully smart. Imagine being the first people around with the whole of North and South America to choose for a home and picking the Texas Panhandle. Just proves Aggies come from an ancient heritage.

  • • •

  I’ve only been married twice, but I think wedding night sex is about the best there is. Worth having a wedding for. I mean, on the wedding night, even though the couple has lived together for years, the partners should feel especially pleasant toward one another.

  It may not surprise the rest of the world, but it did me. Sex is a good deal better when the partners feel pleasant toward one another.

  I’m almost certain Ann loved me that day. She wasn’t blind in love or anything, Ann knew my faults, but she did marry me and I did marry her. Considering the aftereffects, the fact that Ann and I married on purpose should be stressed.

  • • •

  I swung the Chevelle into the driveway where I’d played basketball and Red Rover, Red Rover all those years ago. The yard looked the same—unwatered yellow. Someone had painted the garage, but the house was still the peeling off-white I remembered.

  Ann turned the rearview mirror to herself. She’d spent the last hundred miles trying to make herself and Buggie look like they hadn’t been stuck in a baking car for three days. “I failed,” she said. “What do you think of a headband? Maybe a headband would hide the dirt.”

  “You look fine. When we get in there, keep Buggie from climbing anything. Mom’s not too good with kids.”

  “You should of phoned from Borger. She might want to change sheets or plan menus or something. My mom about worked me to death when company was coming. I had to clean house and dig out the guest towels. Cook extra food. Jeez, I hated company.”

  “My family is different.”

  I wondered how different my family would prove to be. The last contact had ended on a misunderstanding. I forgot what brought on the misunderstanding, but I remembered we parted with sour feelings on both sides, so the upcoming reunion was causing some nervousness, which I hadn’t mentioned to Ann. Reunions always contain the possibility of accusations, berations, and painful regrets, and this particular reunion contained more possibilities than most.

  Barging in didn’t seem right—I no longer lived there—so I rang the doorbell and stood in the heat, waiting. The thing I was most torn about was my hands. Should they be in my pockets or out ready to hug? What if I set myself up for a hug and no one offered? Footsteps sounded inside, moving toward the door.

  “Let me have Buggie.”

  “What?”

  I took him from Ann. “It’ll look better if I’m holding him.”

  “Loren.”

  The door swung open on a short-haired woman with sturdy calves and a rayon print dress. I noticed her calves right away. “They moved and didn’t tell me,” I said.

  “You’re Loren, aren’t you? I’ve seen pictures of you from way back. Of course, you’re older now, but I recognize the glasses. Isn’t it awful about Kathy?”

  “Could we come in?”

  Other than the strange woman, stepping into the living room was like breaking the wax on a time capsule. Maybe they kept everything exactly as it was the day I left as a memorial. Or so I wouldn’t be disoriented if I returned in the night. Nothing had moved or aged—same ratty hooked rug, same nearly matching sofa and chairs, same pocked Motorola. There was the painting of Jesus done all in shades of brown. I spotted the hole I accidentally shot in Jesus’ neck with a new .22 Don bought me on my sixteenth birthday.

  “Look everyone,” the short-haired woman announced. “It’s Loren.”

  “Figures.” Mom stood in her slip and electric curlers, ironing something black. A cigarette hung from lips that sagged more than I recalled, and her hair around the rollers was more silver-blond where it had been a deeper yellow-blond. “You always was more interested in dead family than live,” she said.

  “I’m glad to see you, Mama.”

  “Hey, Spunky.” Don gave me a mock salute from the overstuffed recliner in front of the Motorola. “Ain’t it a shame.”

  His calling me Spunky was one of several reasons I couldn’t stand my stepfather.

  “Sure is.” I took for granted, “Ain’t it a shame,” referred to Kathy, but he could have meant the game he was watching or the heat or something unrelated to anything I’d ever heard about. It is to Ann’s everlasting credit that, after hearing Don, she never once called me Spunky. Not even in teasing.

  “Look, Patrick, it’s your brother.” The woman must have figured Patrick needed more introduction than Mom or Don.

  Patrick sat at the kitchen table, staring at me over a Macintosh Scotch bottle and a tinted Coca-Cola glass. He raised the glass as if to toast. “Kathy’s dead,” he said.

  “That’s why we came down.” In my absence, Patrick’s hair had fallen out except around the sides and his face had changed to gray.

  Mom flipped an ash into a plastic ashtray on the ironing board. “He was nuts over dead animals. It got so the backyard stunk from all the armadillos and possums he buried out there. And birds, hundreds of stinking birds in his drawers and closet.” I think she was talking to the strange woman, but Mom kept glancing at the ceiling as if she was talking to someone up there. “The police brought him home after they caught him in Grumbach’s Funeral Parlor, touching the bodies. Millie Grumbach thought he was disgusting.”

  “Aw, Mom, I was just a kid.”

  “You better not touch Kathy today. I got friends coming from the bar. I won’t have you pawing your dead sister.”

  The hostility confused me. I don’t know how I expected Mom to behave, but this wasn’t it. I touched Ann’s shoulder. “Folks, I’d like you to meet my wife, Ann, and this is our son, Buggie…Fred.”

  Caught them off guard with that one. They’d been all worked into an attitude and now they had to adjust. Mom stubbed out her cigarette, eyeing Buggie. Patrick more like leered at Ann. Don kept his eyes on the game, but he must have been paying attention. The Cubs led the Mets nine to two, and that couldn’t have been as interesting as the long-lost son appearing with wife and child.

  “What a beautiful baby,” Mom said. “Is he legitimate?”

  “Was I?”

  All right. Get those hostilities out where everyone can see. To hell with polite conversation in suburbia. Buggie squirmed in my arms. A cat sauntered in from the direction of my old room. He sat in the doorway and yawned, watching. Somewhere in the back of the house, a washing machine went into an off-balance spin cycle.

  “I’m real pleased to meet you, Mrs. Paul,” Ann said. “Loren’s told me all about you.”

  Patrick spoke. “How long have you and my brother been married?”

  “Since yesterday.” Ann reached over like she wanted Buggie, but I pretended not to see.

  Patrick drained his glass and clicked it down with some finality. “You’re in it now.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  The cat turned and walked back toward my old room.

  “Guess he didn’t mention my name,” Mom said, lighting another cigarette. Ann forcibly removed Buggie from my arms. I didn’t mind. The moment for a spontaneous hug was past.

  “Name’s Mrs. Buttercott. Deela Buttercott. I’ve been Mrs. Buttercott fifteen years, but he ain’t heard yet.”

  Driving down from Colorado, I’d daydreamed a number of possible receptions and how I would graciously handle each. I would comfort the grief-stricken, bolster the bewildered and lost, show humility if praised for my collegiate degree or the taste displayed by my marriage. But I hadn’t made any plans based on festered resentments. In spite of Kathy’s funeral, I’d hoped for a cheerful welcome.

  There’s a short story in the Bible, I think Jesus wrote it, about a prodigal son who comes home after more or less going off to college and
blowing his daddy’s trust fund on women and whiskey and never writing or calling collect on Mother’s Day, never so much as a Christmas card. If he was anything like me, he used his mom’s self-addressed, stamped envelopes to store marijuana. The money runs out, the kid comes home, and his dad goes apeshit with joy. Buys him all new clothes, throws a king-hell of a party, kills the fatted calf. The kid’s brother resents all this, understandably, because he stayed home and didn’t get any whiskey or women and the dad never gave a hoot one way or another.

  I had hoped for something along the lines of the Bible story. Not the new clothes or the king-hell party—after all, we were gathering for a funeral—but “Gee, it’s good to see you,” or “You’ve stayed away too long, son,” would have been nice. My sister was dead. In any normal family, that alone would have been cause for forgiveness and drawing together. My old mama, though, she didn’t draw together for anybody.

  The short-haired woman came over and shook Ann’s hand. “I’m Jennifer, I’m married to him.” She pointed at Patrick. “We’ve only been married a year, but we separated last month because he’s an alcoholic. Don’t you just hate alcoholics? The only thing in the world worse than being an alcoholic is being married to one. He talked me into coming back for a few days because Kathy got killed. Did you know Kathy?”

  “No.” Ann kept glancing around, looking for a place to sit or run, I’m not sure which. Her pupils were so dilated that her eyes showed only black and white. She didn’t seem to notice Buggie squirming. I guided her to the plastic divan and motioned her to sit.

  “You okay?”

  Ann nodded. I sat next to her. The plastic on the couch was light brown with dark brown splotches. I think it was supposed to look like cowhide.

  “My own mother has ankylosis spondylitis,” Jennifer continued. “She can’t raise her head above her waist anymore, but you should talk to her. Mind sharp as a tack. She gets up and dresses herself every day. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  I couldn’t understand why this woman was telling me about her mother. I held down one side of the room, Mom and Patrick the other, daring each other to draw first so we could open fire with old crimes neither forgotten nor forgiven—She gave away my puppy; he tore up my second-grade art project; she married a man who calls me Spunky; he’s ashamed of his family; my real love died and his didn’t; ignorant, unsophisticated hick; ingrate—unspoken bullets flew around the room, while, oblivious to the crossfire, this woman with fat legs talked about her mother who was shaped like a horseshoe.

  “Is the boy hungry? Mrs. Howell from next door brought over a bucket of chicken and some coleslaw and chocolate cake. The cake’s Winn-Dixie, but the coleslaw tastes homemade. Your baby must be hungry after the ride. Long drives are so hard on children.”

  “No thanks,” I answered.

  “Thank you for offering,” Ann said.

  “Just trying to be polite.”

  “We appreciate it.”

  Jennifer sat on the couch next to Ann, and for some reason, took her hand. “Kathy was such a pretty girl. So nice. She was a twirler in junior high, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “The last few years she got a little wild sometimes, and she was always woozy on drugs, but I know for a fact Kathy never used a needle. She used to say to me, ‘Jenny,’ she called me Jenny even though no one else does. ‘Jenny, I love being hammered, but I’ll never use a needle. Needles are going too far.’ I think she would have grown out of drugs eventually. She was a good girl, deep inside. It was those boys got her to do it. Kathy just wanted to be popular. She’d have grown out of it, wouldn’t she, Patrick?”

  Patrick’s look was nasty. “How the hell should I know. She’s dead.”

  Something shifted and Mom, Patrick, and I turned our attention to Jennifer. My theory on what happened is that all the disarrayed anger and bitterness flying around the room united into one blazing, pure column of hatred aimed at this brainless outsider who had the gall to explain Kathy to us. Her own family.

  “When the riots started, Kathy and her little friends drove over to Houston. They said they wanted to watch the cops and niggers shoot each other, but what they really wanted was to loot drugstores.”

  “Shut up.” Patrick spit.

  I threw in my opinion. “Oh, yeah?”

  But Mama was the one to let the emotions flow. No internalizing-caused canker sore for Mama. At least, not on her lips. “To hell with you, Jennifer. Kathy didn’t take drugs and she wasn’t no tramp. They killed her coming out of Woolworth’s with five Barbie dolls and two Kens. Kathy loved Barbie and Ken.”

  “Why, Deela, I never said Kathy was a tramp. You know how much Kathy and I cared for each other. We were like sisters.”

  “Same as Loren and I are like brothers,” Patrick said, which I thought was a cheap shot.

  Mom pointed the iron at Jennifer like an outstretched pistol.

  “You always thought Kathy was a whore and a heroin addict and you hate your husband. What are you doing here?”

  Jennifer paled. “I came to help you. In times of grief we must forget past differences and support each other.”

  “Bullshit.” The iron sailed past Patrick and out the kitchen window. Glass sprayed the sink and windowsill. Mom shouted over Buggie’s surprised wail, “You think we’re getting what we deserve and you came for a front-row seat, you bitch.” Mom appeared ready to spring around the ironing board. “Maybe Kathy was a tramp, and I’ve got one boy in prison, Pat always drunk, and that son of a bitch who don’t even write in four years, but my baby’s dead and I’ll be damned if I’ll be a sideshow for you.”

  The violence drained from Mom’s face and tears came. She bent over so I could see the scalp furrows between her electric curlers. A tear clung to the bottom of her cigarette. Others dripped onto her black dress. She lifted one hand to her face and emitted a choked sort of sob.

  I put my finger in Buggie’s fist and rocked it up and down, watching him cry. Ann, too, concentrated on soothing Buggie. Jennifer sat straight, looking at the broken window and squeezing her left hand with her right. Patrick stared into his empty glass.

  Twenty seconds passed. Maybe thirty. The volume of Mom’s crying sank from anger to grief to despair to a sniffly lost kind of resignation. Don leaned over and turned up the sound on the ball game. Not looking at Mom, he said, “Quitcher bitchin’, Deela. Bad things happen to ever’body. You’re not special.”

  • • •

  High-school funerals always play to a full house. This is because so few teenagers believe in death, and when one of their kind jams the fact home, they stream toward the body, drawn by the irresistibility of all repulsive objects.

  The Victoria Bible Baptist Church was packing them in. All young, all stunned. Except for those strange men who make a profession of funerals, I didn’t see a single grown-up outside the family pew. Twisting in my seat, I watched the young faces. A few wept, some showed anger and resentment, as if Kathy’s death was a colossal gyp, but most wore the lost, lethargic looks of small children—say, a month-old baby. Their egos had not yet deflected the truth, and in that short gap of vulnerability, they seemed almost human.

  Buggie pushed a truck along the pew between Ann and me. Patrick and Jennifer sat between us and Mom, with Don on the inside aisle. Mom was through crying. Her eyes stayed away from Kathy, seeming to focus on a chart plotting the figures for last week’s Sunday school attendance—DOWN FOUR. Her crossed hands never moved.

  Kathy’s death affected me a good deal more than her life had. I hardly remembered her life. She was thirteen when I last knew her. She wore a pink cashmere sweater with Kinney Casual tennis shoes and she talked on the phone. She hated cheese in any form. I can’t recall her voice.

  The people who coordinate these functions had placed a rose across Kathy’s breast. I hadn’t seen her breasts before. They looked cosmetic. Her neck
was longer and her cheekbones higher than I recalled. She’d grown her hair out to where it swept across the side of her face and over her shoulders. This dead Kathy wasn’t old enough to legally vote, drink, or make love. She’d never been out of South Texas. I wondered if the Ranger who killed her felt any regret.

  The preacher was younger than me. Tanned, self-assured, he stood up there like a golf pro—a fourth-generation country club sophisticate. He prayed awhile, then he compared Kathy’s life to the flight of an arrow. “It’s not how far you fly, it’s how straight.” I felt like saying “crap,” but everyone else seemed to buy the Kathy-as-straight-arrow metaphor, who was I to push for realism?

  I should face something here. Ever since I boxed up a squashed mole for Show ‘n’ Tell in the first grade, I’ve been a pseudodeath obsessive. I think about death, talk about death, write about death, play little games with it. I figure flow charts on the possibilities of heaven, reincarnation, transmigration, the void; does the spirit inhabit rocks? Are snow crystals unborn babies? However, in spite of a daily diet of the stuff, I have no idea what really happens when people disappear. I’m an expert without an opinion. Religious and antireligious beliefs all strike me as bizarre.

  The one image of death I hold to came from a Twilight Zone I saw years ago. I must have been very young; I remember watching the show in my rocking horse jammies and my brother Garret spilling a purple Fizzies drink on the rug. The Twilight Zone was about an old woman who was frightened of death and would never open her door for fear it would get her. Robert Redford played a charming young man who tricks his way into her apartment, convinces her that death is neat, and leads the old lady away into a fog bank. Ever since, I’ve pictured dying as being led into a fog bank by Robert Redford. According to my odds chart, this has the same degree of possibility as heaven.