by Tim Sandlin
“Can I touch your tummy?”
“Sam, you’re so damn predictable.”
“I just want to touch our baby.” Light came through between the slats of the deck, causing a venetian-blind effect. Maurey’s eyes were in the dark, but her mouth and forehead were lit yellow.
She said, “I think Farlow kicked yesterday.”
“We’re naming him Farlow?”
“That’s what I call him when I talk to him at night. Stub Farlow is the name of the guy on the horse on our license plates, but I can’t see calling him Stub.”
“You talk to Farlow at night?”
“I read him horse stories.”
She unzipped her Wranglers and lifted her shirt. In the cross-shadows, her stomach bloated out some, enough to hold up the jeans without help from zippers or buttons, but not much more, only her belly button had turned out where it used to be in. I held out my right hand and touched her with my fingertips.
What I wanted, badly, was a sense of someone real in there, someone that Maurey and I had created out of nothing. But I just couldn’t make the leap from runny mayonnaise on a sock to a human person who could sing and play baseball and watch TV. The deal wasn’t real yet, and I was afraid it never would be.
Maurey gazed down at her belly. “Mom won’t say a word, but I can tell she’s going nuts to find out if I’ve still got it. She sneaks in my room when she thinks I’m asleep and stands there staring at me for hours. It’s spooky.”
“You guys never talked about Rock Springs?”
Maurey put her hand next to mine. “I haven’t talked to Mom about anything since then. She cries constantly, like a wet rag. Gets on my nerves. Feel over here, I think this might be his head.”
I felt, but not very hard for fear of squashing his temple. “What does your dad say?”
“What can he do? He knows something weird is up with Mom and me, but he’s too cowboy to pry.”
“Even if his own family is going nuts?”
“He figures we’ll come to him when we’re ready. Besides, the mares will be foaling soon. Dad doesn’t have time to referee a war.”
“He’s not curious why his daughter and wife won’t talk to each other?”
Maurey guided my fingertips across her stomach. “I guess he’s curious, but he won’t invade our personal problems.”
“You’re his family.”
I thought I felt something, but I wasn’t sure. Her skin was harder than it used to be, like a softball, and I was afraid to touch her belly button.
“At least I’m not sick all day and night anymore,” Maurey said. “Mrs. Hinchman’s perfume about gagged me to death last month.”
“Has Dothan figured it out?”
Maurey lowered her shirt but left her jeans unzipped. She brushed the dirt off her fingers onto my knee. ‘‘Dothan doesn’t know where babies come from. He’s as stupid as you are when it comes to that stuff.”
“Are you training him?”
Maurey slipped by that one. “The secret won’t last forever, so the day after school ends I’m going public. You and Lydia might want to head back to North Carolina about then.”
“I’m not heading anywhere. Farlow’s as much my baby as he is yours.”
“We may have to talk about that some, Sam.”
She moved so the light shaft was on her eyes. They looked dark blue and sad. I reached over and took her hand. “Some shit will hit if this baby’s not half mine after it’s born.”
She pulled her hand away a second, then came back. “Lydia’s been whining for months to go back home. What happens when your grandfather says okay?”
“I’ll stay here with you.”
“Be real, Sam.”
“Or you can come with us.”
“I’m not leaving Wyoming, you think I’m crazy.”
This line of thought gave me a creepy feeling. I was still holding out hope that Buddy would make Maurey marry me. I mean, there were laws that said you had to marry a girl if you got her pregnant. All the time I heard people say, “They had to get married.” Had doesn’t leave a choice. I’d just never figured where Dothan would fit in.
***
The Forest Service also provided the only spring baseball diamond in the form of its plowed parking lot. On weekends, when the cars were gone, we’d choose sides and play these thirty-two-inning games that practically always ended in beanball fights. Choosing up sides may be the single most devastating element in the formation of bad self-images in America. In every neighborhood one poor little bugger is always the last chosen, which in our case was that born loser, Rodney Cannelioski. If he hadn’t been a loser, people would have called him Rod.
For Rodney the Religious, it was even worse than your average teenage humiliation because we always shipped him off to baseball no-man’s land—right field—and since the Forest Service parking lot was only big enough for the diamond, outfielders stood in knee-deep snow. Cut down on mobility. Balls hit out there stuck like Brer Rabbit’s fist in the tar baby.
Add to which, standing in snow is cold and it’s no wonder Rodney didn’t enjoy himself on weekends.
One Saturday we played from noon till almost dark. I had six home runs and a triple, and Kim Schmidt and I turned a nifty double play on Dothan and somebody’s cousin from Dubois. My next time at bat, Dothan threw four fastballs at my head.
“Easier than letting you hit a home run to Rodney,” he called as I trotted down to first.
“Right,” I said.
I stole second, then when Teddy hit a hard grounder to the shortstop, instead of charging for third, I fielded the ball barehanded and nailed Dothan in the back. Thock. What a wonderful sound.
Results were predictable.
On the walk home I held my head forward and low so the blood would still be flowing enough to freak out Lydia. She can be a tough mom to get a response out of.
“There’s gravel stuck in your ear,” Kim said.
“You know, I’m starting to feel like a local.”
“Starting to act like one too.”
“Think I’ll have a black eye?”
Kim studied my face. “Only thing dark is from asphalt.”
“Maybe if I don’t wash, it’ll look like a black eye.” Bruises would impress Maurey; Chuckette might even let me touch her below the neck. I know that goes against what I said earlier about Chuckette, but a tit’s a tit and should always be touched, regardless of how ugly the head it goes with.
Soapley and Otis stood by one of the dead GMCs, looking somewhat mournfully over at my place. We walked over so I could show off my blood and Kim could get in his throwing-up-dog imitation.
“The three-legged cowdog,” Kim said, then he went into the ack, ack, morph routine. Otis wagged his little tail. I was kind of impressed, which shows how long I’d been away from wholesome entertainment.
The left strap of Soapley’s overalls was broken. He gummed his toothpick around so it pointed at a Volkswagen bug parked in my front yard next to Lydia’s Oldsmobile. “I seen two of them last summer. They had one at the Fina and the little bitty engine was in back. Alcott made a fool of himself looking for it to check the oil.”
“Seems like the wind would blow it off the road,” Kim said.
Soapley didn’t have his teeth in, which was odd for me because I’d never known they came out. His face caved in when he spoke. “One hit a frost heave up by Cooke City and the bubble come right off the wheels, killed a college boy.”
“I wonder who’s at your house,” Kim said.
“Somebody with a Volkswagen,” I said. Unknown visitors were not a good sign. In all the years of my short life with Lydia, not a single surprise visitor had turned into a pleasant experience. Scenes ranged from king-hell boring to ugly three-way tensions between Caspar, Lydia, and the visitor, but however it went, the surprise was
never pleasant.
“I better go in,” I said.
“Better hurry or you’ll stop bleeding.”
***
“Sam’s hurt,” Delores gushed, then she rushed and I backed against the door. She was so short, with such huge breasts and a tiny waist, it was like being rushed by an ostrich. Or maybe the ostrich feeling came from her pink getup. Every time I saw Delores she was dressed completely in one color—white, silver, turquoise—all the way down to her boots and up to her cowboy hat. Today she was a flash of pink.
A pink fake-silk handkerchief came from somewhere and I found my right ear pinned to one of the monster tits while she jammed blood back up my nose. “He’s wounded, Lydie.”
‘‘Wounded means shot. Sam looks more punched out.” Through the pink haze, I saw Lydia on the couch next to Dougie Dupree. He had on loafers, slacks, and a madras shirt. Lydia was barefoot, as usual, in jeans and a sweatshirt that said Duke. A half-full bottle sat on the stack of Dictionary of American Biography and chunks of lemon were scattered on the coffee table and floor. Obviously, we were chest-deep in an alcohol session.
Dougie spoke through a lemon wedge. “There is one more example of an event that would not occur in New York City.”
“They’d slit your throat for a cigarette, but they wouldn’t punch you out. Why did someone hit you, Sammy?” Lydia’s face held the danger smile, the one that sets off little smoke alarms in my head. Even bent over with my ear up against God’s own tit, I knew trouble was courting the Callahan household.
I decided to lie. “A fella said my mom was a tramp so I hit him and he hit me back.”
“How noble.” Delores clamped me even tighter to her breast. She smelled of Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder and I wanted to turn my mouth more into her, only I was afraid I’d bleed down her pink ruffly blouse.
“Sam’s a regular prince,” Lydia said. She knew I was lying. Lydia can always tell, somehow, and I can always tell when she’s lying, but in spite of this mutual curse we both go on lying to each other on a daily basis.
“You must admit Marlon Brando is the dominant tragedian of our time,” Dougie said, I guess resuming something I’d interrupted. Dougie blew my theory that tall men are never full of crap.
“Brando’s eyeballs are upside down,” Lydia said. “He’s like one of those drawings you turn over and they go from happy to sad.”
Delores sighed, which made her breast heave into my face. “I’d let Marlon Brando turn me over. Dougie, did you ever do it from the back? Ray won’t do it that way, says it’s perverse.”
I muffle-mumbled. “I can’t breathe.”
“I bet Sammy likes doing it from the backside. He wouldn’t call it perverse.”
Lydia looked at me and threw down a shot. “Delores, you relate all subjects to your organs.”
“I can’t breathe.”
When Delores let up, the oxygen rush made me dizzy. “I better clean up.”
“Don’t dribble on the floor.”
Dougie was cutting lemons for another round. “The New York–trained actors are so superior to those who matriculate in Hollywood, there is no comparison whatsoever.”
I went to the bathroom to wash off blood, then back to my room to change clothes and look up matriculate. As I passed through the living room, Delores was sitting up close to Dougie with her legs crossed so her pink skirt didn’t cover much of anything. She touched his elbow when she talked. “Life magazine says Picasso caught gonorrhea from an orgy with colored women.”
Back in my room, I left the door cracked and sat at my desk listening to the grown-ups kill off their fifth of tequila. Dougie was explaining why Andy Warhol was a cheater when Lydia said, “I want to dance.”
“Dance?”
“In Greensboro I used to enjoy dancing.”
I’d been working on a short story about an artist who suspends small dead animals in Jell-O molds. It was inspired by this stuff Max made at the White Deck where he’d start the Jell-O setting up, then dump in canned fruit cocktail and all the grapes and whatever fruit is in fruit cocktail would sink part way to the bottom and stop. Max left his Jell-O in the fridge for a week, so if you ordered it Friday the skin was like rubber. I liked that.
Two of the most famous art critics in Paris scratched their chins as they circled Sam Callahan’s gelatinized sculpture.
“It’s genius,” the one murmured.
“I have never looked at a rat with such clarity,” said the other. “Observe the terror in her eyes. The struggle of the ears juxtaposed against the strawberry Jell-O.”
“I wonder how he makes it so lifelike,” murmured the first critic.
Sam put on his Blackfoot smile. Little did the critics know the rat had been alive when dropped into the Jell-O mold.
Lydia’s head appeared at the door. Her eyes had the bemused yet reckless glitter of a skydiver about to take his two-hundredth leap. I’d never seen Lydia blasted on tequila before, and I’m not sure she ever had been. Tequila was fairly new to serious drinkers back then; they hadn’t realized yet that it’s not the same drug as bourbon or gin.
“You stop bleeding?”
“Yeah, I’m doing my homework,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked why I was sitting at my desk writing on a legal pad.
“We’re leaving for Jackson to dance at the Cowboy Bar. Dougie has a new car.”
“You’re going to ride in a Volkswagen?”
“I’ll make Delores sit in back, otherwise she’ll make obscene advances at Dougie all the way and they’ll sneak off and leave me alone in the Cowboy. I’m not willing to break in new dance talent tonight.”
Her forehead was soft but her eyes buzzed and her mouth kind of twitched. She’d looked like this the week she did whatever she did that got us shipped to Wyoming.
“What do I tell Hank when he calls?”
“Tell him Crazy Horse got what he deserved.”
***
The phone woke me from a dream where my teeth rotted from the roots and fell into a cube of mixed-fruit Jell-O and stuck there all cluttered and disorganized. I knocked the alarm clock to the floor, then bent down to discover the time was just after midnight. Drunk Dougie must have driven the bug into a frost heave and killed my mother, left her twisted on the pavement with blood trickling from both ears. If I picked up the phone my new life as an orphan without Lydia would begin.
The phone stopped ringing for about thirty seconds before it started again. Those were a rough thirty seconds. The mental picture of Lydia dead made me sick, struck down with a flu attack. Maybe she wasn’t dead but only brainless in a coma. Shoulda-saids and deals with God blitzed through my head, so when the phone rang the second time I went for it.
The voice said, “He that digresseth from the matter to fall upon the person ought to be suppressed by the speaker. No reviling or nipping words must be used.”
“Caspar, you scared the doo out of me. I thought Lydia fell in a frost heave.”
“Your next assignment is to memorize Robert’s Rules of Order, Grandson. Life must be order. Business cannot continue without consistency.”
“Lydia and I are full of order. What was that about progresseth from the matter and nipping words?”
“The matter is carbon paper.”
“Caspar, it’s after two o’clock your time. Did you call to read to me about nipping words?”
“I called to speak to your mother.”
“Your daughter?”
“I demand an explanation about the Indian.”
Lemon peels, juice, and salt lay strewed around the table. A tequila bottle was on its side under the TV. They’d left the front door open so the gas heater was blasting away for nothing. Order was not the Callahan word of the day. “She seems to have moved the Indian along for the moment, but she might listen if you make her dump him permanently. Lydia mi
sses your ultimatums.”
“Put her on the phone.”
“Well, she isn’t home right now. She had a meeting.”
“I control the cash flow.”
“And I respect that.”
There was a short sound of old-man breathing. “Tell me what you think about night and day, Grandson.”
“Carbon paper.”
“Good lad.” Caspar hung up.
***
I wandered into the kitchen for a Dr Pepper, then into the bathroom to shake the toilet handle. Lydia would let the water run forever if I wasn’t around. I stood at the open door, staring at Soapley’s junky yard and trailer and the Tetons beyond. There was enough moon to make out mountains over there, but without delineation or substance. Compared to North Carolina, everything I saw was alien. I wondered if North Carolina would be alien when I went back. That would make all places alien and I wouldn’t know where I was anywhere.
The flash of a dead Lydia on the pavement had me screwed up. Maurey contemplated death often, which I’d always put down as a waste of time. To me, death was where they put old people. I’d really be alone if Lydia got drunk and killed—more alone than usual. Then someday I’d die and be alone in a box forever.
Whole thing screwed me up so much I drank a second Dr Pepper and ate a Valium. The Valiums were getting to be a regular thing.
***
Here’s how this deal works: one Valium and one Dr Pepper and I sleep peacefully through the night; one Valium and two Dr Peppers and the need to pee cuts through the fog so I wake up in a couple of hours; two Valiums and two Dr Peppers, I sleep through the night but come to scrambling for the commode. I haven’t tested the progression past two and two.
Somewhere in there I woke up with the itch. I blinked at the moon through the window, then stepped out of bed onto my alarm clock, said “Shit,” and made my way to the bedroom door. Light from the kitchen gave the living room an indirect glow. As I stumbled along considerably more asleep than awake, a sound sunk in—like someone running and a puppy whimpering. It came to me that Dougie Dupree and Lydia were fucking on the couch.