by Tim Sandlin
Roger had no idea how to take that.
***
Roger discovered Lydia Callahan in the Haven House solarium, standing rigidly, her arms crossed over her breasts, staring out the plate-glass window at the Teton Mountains shimmering in the distance. Oly sat in his wheelchair, hunched farther forward than looked safe, probing his right ear with a Q-tip. As Roger entered, Oly withdrew the Q-tip from his earhole, inspected whatever off-yellow waxy substance encased the cotton dab, then he popped the tip into his mouth and twirled it, like a child on a Dum Dum Pop.
Without looking at Oly, Lydia shuddered.
She said, “In all those years of exile, I never dreamed coming home would be like this.”
“Beats feeding horses.” Roger compared any difficult task to throwing bales off the back of a wagon at below-zero temperatures. It gave him perspective.
Lydia turned her laser eyes on Roger. “It’s you.”
“Who did you expect?”
“A mad woman of a certain age whose dream is to elope to Greece with Mr. Pedersen there.” Lydia nodded to Oly, who pulled his hearing aid from his other ear and commenced mining for a snack. He gave no sign of hearing or comprehending the conversation. “The crone absolutely believes I am out to usurp her position in his affections. She barges in every five minutes dead set on stopping me before I seduce this wretched excuse for sentient meat.”
On the words wretched excuse for sentient meat, Lydia’s voice rose to a bitter growl.
Roger watched Oly dig. The old man used a counterclockwise drilling action combined with a short, thrusting pump. Stiff ear hair bushed around the cardboard stick. His lobe dangled, big as a soupspoon.
Roger said, “I hope I’m in as good a shape as Oly, when I reach a hundred.”
Lydia’s upper lip drew back in a way not usually seen on a woman. Her forehead stretched tight, line-less. “I have no intention of ever reaching one hundred.” She paused for emphasis. “Or any age in which I feast on my own bodily fluids.”
Her focus went from Oly to Roger. “Did my son send you here to drive me home? I want you to go back and tell Sam I am perfectly capable of operating a vehicle. The local police understand the upshot of crossing me, so my only concern is the highway patrol, and I can avoid them.”
Roger gathered his courage and crossed the line from which there was no way back. “I came to tell you I want in.”
Lydia smiled, insincerely. “Isn’t that nice. In what?”
“I’m ready to find out what happened to me, who my mother is—was. How I came to be here.”
For the first time in several days, Lydia felt vindicated. It was one of her favorite emotions—vindication. Quite often, she offered correction to Shannon or me or anyone else in her path, but we rarely appreciated, much less acted on, her advice. Lydia was forced to fall back on I told you so. I-told-you-sos, while uplifting, were simply not as satisfying as having the object of her comments adjust his behavior accordingly.
She said, “What are you talking about?”
Roger hadn’t been around Lydia enough to recognize her affected vagueness. And he didn’t know at what age older people start to forget. For all he could tell, Lydia had blacked out their conversation in the A&W.
“You said you’d figured out who my father is—was. Stepfather.” He tried to place himself in the book. “You said you know the man who wrote the novel, and the novel might be about me.”
Lydia turned her attention to her Radio Shack recording equipment. “I never met Loren Paul personally while he lived in this area. I did have a run-in with his wife once, at Browse and Buy, but as I recall, she was a snob, unlike myself.”
Roger knew myself was wrong, but he didn’t say so. Lydia knew he knew and wasn’t saying so, which irked her almost as much as if he’d corrected her grammar. She realized it was unfair for her to be irked either way, but that didn’t faze her.
“You said he’d moved to Hollywood to write movies,” Roger said. “I’ve decided to call him, on the phone.”
“And what will that prove?” Lydia unplugged the thumb-sized microphone from the tape machine. “He’s not going to know if you’re the lost boy over the telephone. At best, Loren Paul might confirm there actually was a boy and he didn’t make the story up. We already assume that much.”
“I don’t.”
“Even if he denies the boy’s existence, how can we believe him? After all, he’s in the movie business.” She wound the cord around her finger, wondering where she’d left the twisty that was supposed to hold the cord together. “The only way to know whether or not you are the child Fred is to confront Loren Paul. We must show up on his doorstep. Unannounced.”
“We?”
“You don’t think I would let you go to Santa Barbara alone. What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“Wait a minute.” Roger had so many qualms he didn’t know where to begin. The decision to delve into his past had been spur-of-the-moment, when Eden told the nurse to get her baby away from her, or maybe earlier, when the nurse crawled on top of Eden to pound on her belly. Whenever the decision had been made, it had been impulsive. Lydia had obviously thought this out in more detail than he had.
“You said Hollywood. Hollywood isn’t Santa Barbara.”
“Loren Paul and his wife reside in Santa Barbara. It’s where successful screenwriters go to age gracefully. The desperate ones stay in Tarzana.”
“How would you know that?”
Lydia’d made it up based on reading a People she found in her parole officer’s waiting room is how she knew that. She wasn’t about to admit this to Roger. “I did the research.” She opened the box the setup had come in and began to fit pieces into pre-formed plastic slots. “It doesn’t take a genius.”
Lydia paused to admire her fingernails against the black recorder case. Her nails were recovering from prison, slowly but inevitably. Lydia saw them as symbolic.
“Although my innate intelligence did make it simpler for me than it would have been for the average male,” she said. “I called the Writers Guild of America and asked for his address.”
“And they gave it to you.”
“Why not? I’m no stalker.”
Roger’s impulse was to stall. He’d never been one for impulsive changes, himself, and he hated it even more when someone else tried changing him before he was ready. Roger made decisions gradually as he went about stringing fence or fixing a generator. Plucking his bass with John Coltrane. Reading. Back in high school English lit, he’d been the only kid in his class who didn’t think Hamlet was a total pansy. Choices evolved for Roger, and it took something as extreme as Eden Rae screaming a baby out of her body for him to make a quick one. Lydia’s decisiveness had thrown off his own.
“I’ll need time to work on my truck.”
“We leave the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend. That’s my window—three days without a command performance for the Nazi parole officer.”
“She won’t make it to California without new brakes, and I can’t put them in that soon. Sam won’t let me off to work on my truck.”
“Sam will let you off when I tell him to let you off.” Lydia dropped her brush into her purse and clicked the latch. “Besides, we are taking my BMW, so it is no concern whether your truck has brakes or not.”
“Your car needs a brake job too.”
“Not if one downshifts properly.” Lydia paused for dramatic effect. “Roger.” She went for eye contact. She often went for eye contact when it was least expected. “Don’t go wimbly on me. It’s eleven hundred miles to Santa Barbara, which we can drive in eighteen hours, easily. Add another four hours for side trips and round it off to one full day there and one full day back. That leaves twenty-four hours to complete our business in time for me to report to the bureaucratic bitch Tuesday morning.”
Roger met her gaze head on. �
��What side trips?”
“Something always comes up.” Lydia broke the eye contact, somewhat unnerved that Roger had matched her, intensity for intensity. “We must plan for every mishap.”
Roger crossed his arms and stared at Lydia. He was old enough to know when someone was working an angle on him. He just couldn’t see it. He knew she would be in serious trouble if they were caught out of state, and she wasn’t the type to do good deeds without a return. “I’d still rather take my own truck. I don’t like driving other people’s cars. Not that far, straight through. Your plan doesn’t allow for me sleeping, coming or going.”
“I shall drive while you take naps.”
“You don’t have a license.”
Oly’s throat rattled and he spoke, sounding like an Old Testament God with a head cold. “I can drive an automobile.”
Lydia’s heart gave a little jump. “I always forget he’s not dead.”
Oly swiveled his tortoise head in Lydia’s direction. “I will take my fair turn behind the wheel.”
***
Lydia continued speaking to Roger, as if they were alone in a room full of plastic plants and sunlight. “Ignore that sound.”
“Why should I do that?” Roger asked.
“If you listen to senior citizens, it only encourages them.”
Oly burst into song. He sang, “I will be by your side,” to the tune of the last phrase of “Sidewalks of New York.” This, he repeated several times.
Lydia suddenly flung her attention toward Oly. She called, as if calling to someone in a high wind. “The tape machine is put away, Oly. You don’t have to be awake.”
Oly chewed his lower lip, which can be done if you’ve stretched it daily for nearly a century. His head bobbed a bit, then he came out with, “I am stapled to your backside, so far as California is concerned.”
Lydia turned back to Roger. “What is the coot talking about? I can’t make out a word he says.”
“He says he’s going to Santa Barbara with us,” Roger said.
Lydia dropped into denial. “Do you know what No way, Jose means, old man? Is that a term bandied about by you doughboys back in the Great War?”
Oly sat up, almost straight in his chair. His body had the posture of a whitebark pine, way off alone on a ridgeline. “You are unable to travel without Oly Pedersen.”
Lydia said, “Watch me.”
Oly’s goiter bobbed in counterpoint to his Adam’s apple. It made for a disquieting effect. He said, “If you leave Oly behind he shall tell the woman who comes to visit wearing green trousers. Has a mustache here.” He gestured where Brandy Epstein’s mustache was. “Walks like she has a dowel rod up her patootie.”
Roger said, “What’s a patootie?”
“My parole officer’s a-hole,” Lydia said. “What’s a dowel rod?”
“A stick.”
Oly plowed on. “The woman told me. She said if you do anything I don’t want or don’t do anything I do want, I should telephone her right away and she would clap you back in the hoosegow.”
Lydia sat down hard. “I cannot believe I’m in the presence of a being who just said hoosegow.” She shouted directly at Oly, “Hopalong Cassidy is dead, Gabby! It’s your turn now!”
Oly stuck the hearing aid back in. “No need to raise your voice. I can hear fine. You’re the one misses half of what any given person says.”
Roger said, “He’s got a point.”
“I don’t care what he’s got. We can’t take a hundred-year-old satchel of bones and blood on a road trip.”
“Why not?” Roger said.
“What he said,” Oly said.
Lydia couldn’t understand why Roger was taking Oly’s side. Why would any man take the side of another man against her? That atrocity had never happened before prison. Three years of being out of circulation seemed to have changed the rules—tipped the balance in a way she didn’t care for.
“For one thing,” she said, “we only have three days to reach the coast, discover your roots, and return home. He’ll be forcing potty stops every ten miles.”
“I can hold my water as long as you can, little lady.”
“I’ll drive myself alone,” Roger said. “Sam will loan me the van.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Lydia sat with her purse on her lap, strumming the fingers of both hands across the clasp. To the casual eye, she looked uncertain—the classic female stuck between two distasteful choices, refusing both. Her gaze wandered from the floor to the mountains to Oly. In reality, she had already accepted the hard facts and was now quickly working out a new implementation.
She said, “Do you have any concept of how long that frowzy bureaucrat will put me back inside if you were to die on this trip?”
Oly snorted, bull-like. “I shall outlive you, missy.”
First little lady and now missy. Even Roger knew Oly was flirting with violence. At the rate he was offending Lydia, there was a decent chance he wouldn’t survive till lunch.
“How am I supposed to spirit you out of Heaven House?” Lydia asked.
“Haven House,” Roger said.
“I was making an ironic point.”
Roger shrugged. He didn’t see the point of mispronouncing words on purpose, ironically or any other way.
“Someone will object,” Lydia said. “That bodyguard girlfriend of yours will dial 911.”
Oly clenched both handrails of his chair with whatever grip he had left. “I am with you till we complete the mission.”
“It can’t be done.”
If Oly had had a chin, he would have stuck it out. As it was, he stuck out his turkey neck. “You are a sharp cookie. Make a scheme.”
***
Roger found me in the former tack room turned office, fighting with my first computer, a brand-new Macintosh Centris. What I couldn’t figure out was why when I hit Return at the end of a line, it returned twice. And why I couldn’t make the tab come out right or start a new page at the end of the one I was typing. Whatever is simple on a typewriter is complicated on a computer. And vice versa.
Roger stood at my shoulder, watching. “What are you doing, Sam?”
“I make the arrow go side to side with this mouse goober, but when I reach the edge of the pad, the arrow stops. I can’t make it go on farther.”
“Pick the mouse up.”
“What?”
“Lift the mouse off the pad.”
“Won’t that make the arrow disappear?”
“No, it won’t. Lift the mouse.”
I lifted the mouse. The arrow didn’t disappear.
“Put it down in the center of the pad.”
I did.
“Now move the mouse.”
Problem solved.
***
Roger gave me the lowdown on the Disappearance book and Lydia’s theory—Santa Barbara, Freedom, Fred, Oly’s part in the scenario.
“Loren Paul had great potential as a novelist. He could have been a literary lion,” I said. “The last I heard he was writing a daytime television serial mostly set in the powder room at Caesar’s Palace, the one in Vegas. Some sort of trash about bonus baby women and their personal assistants, locked in for a month.”
“I haven’t seen TV in a while,” Roger said.
“He’s making a billion dollars on it,” I said. “Too bad. He once published a novel called Yeast Infection that was revolutionary.”
“You think Loren could be my stepfather?”
I hit the Save key—I knew that much—and moved to my coffee-making station. “I went looking for my dad once,” I said. “It turned out badly. I wreaked havoc on a bunch of innocent folks. You want a cup?”
Roger nodded. The one trait I’d passed on to him was the coffee habit. “You think me showing up might hurt this guy and his wife?”
/> “Anytime you change the past, there are consequences.”
Roger trailed across the tack room after me. “The past is done with. The facts can’t be changed.”
“How people see the past is what matters. Facts themselves are irrelevant. This trip may or may not screw up Loren and his wife in Santa Barbara, but it’s almost bound to change you.” I poured water from my liter bottle into the Hot Shot. “You sure you want to change?”
Roger opened my dorm-sized refrigerator and pulled out a can of milk. “I’d like to know what happened before I came to Wyoming.” He opened the can with what in my youth was called a church key. I don’t know what the thing is called now.
“I’m happy enough.” His mouth pursed, like he was tasting the statement for accuracy. “I’m okay, anyway, except for the suicide beyond my control thing.”
“There is that.”
“It feels like I’m a kid, content to play in the sandbox, only a Dempsey Dumpster is hanging over my head. It’s hard to get on with life, knowing it might fall on me at any moment. I can’t relax.”
“So it’s better to make the Dumpster fall on your head than to wait for it to crash of its own accord. Symbolically speaking.”
“Lydia says it’s not healthy for me to hang around you and a bunch of miserable pregnant teenagers. She told me this story about Jim Bridger and the arrowhead.”
Actually, I told the story to Lydia first, but she’s long since forgotten her source. This is it: An Indian zings an arrow into Jim Bridger’s back, but it doesn’t kill him. Jim goes about his mountain man business for twenty years with an arrowhead embedded just below the shoulder blade. It bothers him quite a bit, but he can live with the discomfort. Then, a preacher comes along who claims he can Bowie knife the arrowhead out of Jim. The operation hurts like holy hell, but afterward Bridger is out of pain for the first time since the Indian nailed him.
“It’s Lydia’s seminal story,” I said.
“Seminal?”
“She defines herself by it. She used to tell it to Shannon in the crib.”
“Maybe that’s why Shannon grew up so peculiar.”
“My daughter is not peculiar. She’s the picture of mental health, in her own way. Have you considered why Lydia wants the two of you to go off on this adventure?”