by Tim Sandlin
I shook my head. “My mom doesn’t get out much. She’s having trouble adjusting to the dry air.”
“I’ll just have to drop in on her with my welcome wagon basket. My baskets are very popular this time of year.”
“I’d think awhile before I did that, ma’am.”
***
All the rules must have been off that day because when I tramped home through the snow, Lydia wasn’t there. Surprised the heck out of me. I took advantage of the situation to dump overflowing ashtrays and clean out the Dr Pepper stash beneath the couch. At least Lydia was consistent—two and a half packs of cigarettes, variety of brands, six pops, Dr Pepper, and a pint of gin, Gilbey’s, a day. A boy needs consistency in his life.
The Olds 88 sat in the rut that passed for our driveway, which meant Lydia walked away into the storm or somebody came and got her. Either one would be unique unto itself, but presidential assassinations are unique unto themselves and other little uniques tend to spin off their wake. Look at my afternoon with Maurey.
I drank from my own Dr Pepper and sat on the couch reading Catch-22 and Marty’s Big Season. Marty’s Big Season is about a Little League team whose coach walks out and this kid, Marty, takes over the team and manages them into the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. A team coached by Marty’s hero uses unethical tactics to beat them and Marty learns a lesson about life.
Catch-22 is about despair, death, and the hopelessness of a sane man in an insane world. It’s a comedy.
The house was too quiet. I kept glancing up at Les, expecting him to have moved a tiny bit. The refrigerator hummed some, the water heater knocked, but other than that, it was like no one had been around lately. I went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet but didn’t jiggle the handle like you had to to make it quit running. Lydia’d told me the sound of running water soothes neurotics and we’d all be calmer if we slept next to a creek. She said TV white noise does the same thing, which is why she always slept on the couch with the television turned all the way up on a dead channel.
A truck pulled up and I checked out the window, but it was only old Soapley coming in from making sure nobody got too much water or plowing roads or whatever he did late every afternoon. Soapley’s cowdog Otis still rode standing on the top of the cab, even in winter, and I was afraid he’d fall off someday and die right in front of me.
***
Lydia’s bedroom-turned-closet smelled different from the rest of the house. I don’t know what it was—Lysol and woman odors or maybe a mouse died under the empty bureau or something—but it made me want to get in and get out without wasting any time.
The panty box sat right next to the bureau. Why didn’t she open a drawer and dump stuff in? I generally took care of the laundry—we had an ancient Whirlpool set off the kitchen—but I left her clothes in a pile for her to fold and put away. Our relationship wasn’t that sick. But why shovel them into a cardboard box instead of a drawer next to it? Maybe unpacking would be like admitting we live here. Heck, I don’t know. A person could waste weeks tracking down the motivation behind any move Lydia made.
She owned about sixty pairs of panties too. Digging through the box was like swimming. Swimming in panties is how I’d found the photographs in the first place, but I wasn’t about to expose that much to Maurey. Rules off or not, the walls had only been down one afternoon.
I took the photos to my room for a mirror comparison between the guys and me.
Two of the guys stood shoulder to shoulder with their hands on their hips. The other three were posed in fake running and passing shots. Their helmets were weird, like somebody had lacquered ear muffs across the top. Only one had a face mask and it was a single bar.
Numbers 72, 56, 81, 11, and 20. Tackle, center, end, quarterback, and halfback, unless they’d numbered positions different back then. The tackle and center were the two-in-one picture. They had dark jerseys with horizontal stripes at the shoulders. Seventy-two was a big guy, a king-hell teenage giant. I hoped he was my father because that would mean I might grow one of these days.
The center had a square head and missing teeth, and the end wearing the same dark uniform was a thin character with glasses under the one-bar face mask. I didn’t wear glasses so that let him out.
Eleven wore a different uniform, lighter with a squirrelly black stripe around the belly. He had a flattop haircut—racy compared to the other guys’ burrs and crewcuts—and his mouth was skewed in a lewd smirk, as if he had recently laid the photographer’s sister. Lydia would go for that smirk. I studied his eyes, then my own in the mirror. Mine were wider, but so were Lydia’s. You couldn’t tell the color in the picture, but they were darker than the other white guys.
The Negro halfback in what looked like a gray sweatshirt and a dull, leather helmet was shorter than the others—great. A short daddy would be a lot harder to handle than black blood— and he was the only one smiling. Short, fast, and happy. None of those were particularly alluring to Lydia, yet I couldn’t just rule him out and go back to the leering quarterback. His blackness alone would cause no end of shame to Caspar, and Caspar’s shame was all the allure Lydia needed. There’d been a time when Lydia would have cut off her fingers if Caspar told her not to.
This child shrink Caspar slapped on me made a big deal over the Unknown Father. Her name was Dr. Eleanor and I never knew if that was a first name or last. She wore orange fingernail polish.
“Don’t you ever wonder about your father, Sam?”
“Lydia’s dad’s enough for anyone.”
“You aren’t intrigued? What if he’s rich or famous or a wanted outlaw?”
“What if he’s dead?”
“How would you feel if your father were dead?”
“About the way I feel now.”
“Where do you think a person goes when he dies, Sam?”
“France.” Why are people always asking me that question?
“What would you say to your father if you met him this afternoon?”
I thought about that one awhile, torn between my natural smartassness and a sudden urge to be cooperative. I was only ten when Caspar decided Lydia and I had an unhealthy relationship and we should both be dissected. My particular case was kicked off after I hid myself in the back of Lydia’s closet under a pile of her dirty clothes for two days and a night. Smelled nice and warm in there. Police combed the neighborhood while I played out the symbolic womb situation.
“I’d ask him if he can hit a curve ball.”
Dr. Eleanor took this as smartassness, but I’d meant it straight. She looked at me with her lips all prim, which made me feel mean to her, so I tried to explain.
“Lydia can do anything a real father can except teach me how to hit a curve. I can’t hit a curve worth crap.”
Caspar made Lydia go to a shrink too, but she seduced hers and they took off to Atlanta for a week.
The letter came Special Delivery on Sam Callahan’s fourteenth birthday. It was from Don Drysdale, the tallest and most powerful pitcher in major league baseball.
Dear Sam, it read,
Study the pitcher.
Divide the plate into thirds in your mind. Curvesbreak out and few young throwers can start a pitch inside.Only concern yourself with the outside third.
Keep your head down, your front toe closed, andswing through the ball.
Try only to make contact. Worry about home runslater.
By the way, I am your sperm father. Your mom and I thought you should have a normal childhood which I could never have given you. Come to L.A. and I’ll buy you a Ford Mustang and introduce you to some Hollywood babes.
Your Dad,
Don Drysdale
P.S. I love you, Son.
***
Someone pulled into the yard and revved their engine right up to the limit. I took off down the hall into Lydia’s room
and stuffed the photos back under the panty pile. I wonder if there’s a psychological term for a person who owns sixty pairs of panties.
Lydia kicked snow through the front door as I came out of her room. She pulled off her coat, humming a song I’d never heard in my life. “You eat yet?”
She didn’t seem to wonder what I’d been up to in her room. I said, “I waited for you.” Lydia lit a cigarette. I don’t think she noticed the clean ashtrays either. Lydia never was much for noticing changes. She figured stuff just happened without anyone making it happen. “We had a steak in Dubois.”
What’s this we jive? She hadn’t used we about anyone other than me and her in a long time. I took a shot at sounding nonchalant. “Who’s we?”
“Ft. Worth and his friend Hank Elkrunner drove me over to Dubois this afternoon. Hank’s part Indian, Blackfoot or Black-feet, something about feet. He knows all this neat stuff about the forest. We found a badger track.”
“You went into the forest? There’s snow, and cold.”
“They had snowshoes. It was a hoot, Sam. I tried something new.”
“What did you try new?”
“Don’t look at me like that, honey bunny. I told you— snowshoeing. It was wholesome.” She kicked off her shoes and padded barefoot into the kitchen, then came back with a glass of water, which was really weird. The only time Lydia ever touched water was to wash down pills.
This time she drained the whole glass. “I thought I would never do anything new again the rest of my life, but now I did. How about that?”
“How about that.”
She came over and gave me a little motherly hug. “Don’t be such a grump, Sam. We’re in this place. Hell hole or not, we might as well admit it and see what there is to see.” I’d been giving her that rap for a month now, but you’d think Lydia was the first person in history to realize it’s more satisfying to live where you are than where you aren’t.
“Did you hear about President Kennedy?” I asked.
She broke the hug and went over to pat Les on the side of the head. “Isn’t it a shame.” Lydia stared off into space and I thought she was dwelling on the pitifulness of a national tragedy. Wrong again. “Did you know coyotes and badgers sometimes run together so they can eat whatever the other one kills?”
“Ft. Worth told you all this nature stuff?”
“Hank. He’s interesting. His great-grandfather was one of only four Cheyennes killed at Little Big Horn. That’s in Montana. Custer bought it there.”
“I know about Custer.”
“Hank says he had it coming.”
“This guy sounds like a mountain of folklore.”
“You know that bucking bronco and cowboy on everyone’s license plate?”
“The ones you think are so stupid?”
“They have names, Steamboat and Stub Farlow. Steamboat is the horse.”
This was too much strangeness all in one day. “Do any of these little items relate to us?”
She snuffed out the cigarette before it was half smoked.
“Sammy, information can be interesting even if it doesn’t affect me personally.”
“That’s not how I was raised.”
I headed for the kitchen to boil mac and cheese water, but something bothered me about the setup. “Did those guys come over here and say ‘Let’s go for a ride’?”
Lydia smiled at me. “I met them at the White Deck. Ft. Worth has a hairy fingertip.”
“You went to the White Deck alone?”
“You don’t expect me to stay in this living room forever, do you?”
“I thought you expected to.”
“Honey bunny, there’s a difference between time out and death. Ask Les, he’s the one told me to get my head off the wall.”
I looked up at Les, wondering if Lydia meant that symbolically or literally. A lot of weird things can happen on a pint of Gilbey’s.
She flipped on the TV. A fuzzy image came on of two people showing the mechanics of a rifle. Lydia went on. “That Dotty’s had a fascinating life. She has a little son she hasn’t seen in two years and a husband in Asia, or somewhere, in the army.”
“You talk to Dot?”
“We have a lot in common.”
You think you’re on top of the deal, then suddenly you find yourself actually over to the side with the view blocked.
I was more disoriented than ever.
6
Maurey and I discovered a mutual love of reading books. It was like being in Bolivia or someplace foreign and running into the only other person in a thousand miles who speaks English—instant old-home week.
We raved at each other. “Have you read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel?”
“God, it was great. Have you read Stranger in a Strange Land?”
Sunday, Maurey and I discussed the sex stuff in Diary of Anne Frank while Petey played fort with the couch cushions. Neither one of us knew exactly what sleeping together meant, we were only sure it meant more than being asleep at the same time in the same place.
“It’s a metaphor,” Maurey said.
“A metaphor for what?”
They were showing the procession as John Kennedy’s body was moved from the White House to the Capitol. It was real sad and dignified. White horses pulled the casket up the street followed by a black horse with empty boots stuck backward through the stirrups.
“Jeeze, what a horse,” Maurey said. “Wouldn’t you love to ride him?”
“Who wouldn’t?” The horse looked like a man-killer to me.
Petey dragged a bunch of dolls and a beat-to-death bear into his fort and pretended they were customers at a drive-up liquor store. Being from North Carolina, I had no idea what that meant until Maurey explained.
“You sure have led a sheltered life,” she said.
“I went to New York City once. I didn’t see any drive-up liquor stores there.”
The literary sex stuff confused us both. Growing up around Lydia, I’d learned the patter early—the hooker laid the John with a Bo Peep fantasy on a half and half—but I didn’t know what went where when the hooker did all this.
Maurey couldn’t even follow it that far. “Bo Peep is about doing it?”
I faked sophistication. “Of course.”
Maurey had read ]ane Eyre and D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy. The virgin gets wet and cold in a flood and the gypsy saves her by doing something peculiar.
I told her about the whores in Catch-22.
She told me a Hemingway story where an African guide has a double cot and somebody’s wife sneaks out for a couple of hours, then the next day she blows her husband’s head off.
I told her about The Catcher in the Rye, which I read because a teacher told me not to.
We finally found common ground with Tortilla Flat, in which Danny drags every woman in the Flat into a gully, drinks three gallons of wine, and dies.
“But what happened in the gully?” Maurey asked.
I shrugged. “Seems like a lot of book people die afterward.”
Maurey pointed to the TV. “Here’s the killer.”
“Who are all those other people?”
Boom. Oswald bought the big one. Right there, live, in front of me and everyone else, one person murdered another one.
“Holy cow,” Maurey said.
Annabel brought in a huge bowl of popcorn and stood in the middle of the family room, staring blankly at the Dallas police wrestling Jack Ruby to the concrete floor. She turned to us. “Who’s ready for a snack?”
Petey twisted the bear’s head until it tore off its body.
***
That night I had my first wet dream. It was king-hell peculiar. Lydia and I were in this department store to buy me some new Wranglers. She held a pair of 26-28s up to my waist and said, “Looks right if they don
’t shrink much. Maybe you better try them on.”
I went into the changing booth and Annabel Pierce was sitting on this three-legged stool, naked with Kleenex boxes on both feet. She said, “You didn’t eat the popcorn.”
I couldn’t take off my jeans to try on the new ones with her watching, so I just waited there, holding the pants in front of me, embarrassed because Annabel was old and naked.
She stood up and said, “Here’s what the gypsy did to the virgin,” and she pressed herself against me and kissed me on the lips, a real closed-mouth kiss, felt like kissing the seam on a football.
Lydia banged on the door. “Come on, I want to see the waistline.” Then suddenly I was naked from the navel down, except my socks, and something felt really weird and I woke up with this mess on my stomach.
I wiped myself off with a day-old sweat sock and changed pajamas. In the bathroom, I examined my eyes for signs of jaundice. Me Maw died of jaundice caused by cancer and Caspar said it was hereditary. I checked a mole on my right inner thigh, which I’d been told would change color and fall off if I had polio.
No yellow, no rotting moles. I went in, turned off the TV, and woke up Lydia, which I’d never done before.
She still slept on the couch in an askew post-Gilbey’s position, but at least she’d graduated to a white flannel nightgown. No more waking up fully dressed. Out the window, dawn turned the snow from gray to a light pink. That meant she’d had several hours to process the gin and Valium and might be somewhere near coherent.
I stuck the gooey sock up close to her face. “What’s this?”
Lydia blinked twice, stretched her spine, then made a chewing motion. It was my first experience at watching a woman go from asleep to awake.
“Sammy?”
“Lydia, something weird is going on and I demand an explanation.”
Her eyes focused. “You blew your nose on a sock.”
“No way in the world did this stuff blow out my nose.”
Lydia blinked a couple more times. She touched the goo with her index finger and touched the finger to her tongue. Her eyes woke up. “You jerked off. It’s come.”