by Tim Sandlin
She raised her hands to her face, thumbs on cheekbones, and looked at me through the web. “I’m sorry I did such a shitty job raising you.”
Maybe she meant it. Maybe not. I like to think she did. Either way, I’d gotten what I came for.
“I’m sorry I lied about the rape. I’m sorry I didn’t bake cookies and sing lullabies to you in your crib. I’m sorry you did the laundry. I’m sorry I let you stay out all night—what was the other thing?”
“Homework.”
“I’m sorry I never made you do homework.” She dropped her hands. “Anything else?”
“I guess not.”
“Can you get on with your life now?”
“Yes, I can get on with my life.”
“’Bout damn time.”
***
We celebrated with a conciliatory cup of coffee at the kitchen table. It’s a wonderful old table Lydia found at the estate sale of an old dude ranch where Owen Wister was supposed to have written The Virginian. I liked to imagine Owen writing, “When you call me that, smile!” then spilling his whiskey on this very wood. As soon as Lydia went underground and left me in charge of the house, I planned to steal the table and take it back to Carolina.
Lydia held the cup with both hands and blew steam from the surface. Ever since I can remember, Lydia’s held her coffee cup with both hands. She said, “Did you ever wonder what I did that pissed Caspar off so much he sent us west?”
“Only twice a day for twenty years.”
Lydia glanced at me, then back at her coffee. “Right after you turned twelve, I started seeing Skip.”
“Seeing?”
Her lips flattened in disgust at my stupid question. “Okay, fucking.”
Someday I meant to price lie detector tests. “Funny he didn’t mention it,” I said.
“Skip didn’t know who I was. We had to sneak around on account of his bitchy little wife and my father, so Skip never saw the house. He’d forgotten my name by then, if he ever knew it.”
Lydia with Skip and me with Skip’s wife made for a number of abstract equations.
“Whoever invented the term Southern peckerhead must have been thinking of Skip,” I said.
“Don’t I know it. I only saw him to upset Caspar.” Lydia smiled into her cup. “Upsetting Daddy was the prime directive of my childhood. I can’t tell you how many jerks I did nasty with trying to get his attention.”
“Caspar knew about my fathers?”
“I told him the rape story first, but he threatened to cane them in public, so I had to come clean.”
“You told your father the truth, but not me?”
“I already said that, Sam. Repeating it won’t change the facts.”
When I was young I had this strange feeling everyone around me knew something I didn’t know. Turns out I was right.
“So you screwed Skip, again, and Caspar found out—”
“Caspar always found out.”
“And he shipped us as far away as he could imagine.”
She nodded. “This house. Now that I’m leaving, I think I’ll miss it.”
“C’mon, Lydia. The bureaucrat in charge of dog gifts will open the FedEx packet, throw the toy in the trash, and that will be the end of it.”
Lydia looked dubious. Outside, a truck door slammed. Lydia clicked down her cup.
“Hank’s back,” she said. “Are we done with accusations and recriminations, because I have to hit the trail?”
“I guess so. Shouldn’t we break some glass or scream at each other first? That’s how I was brought up.”
Lydia carried her coffee dregs to the sink. “I’m tired of breaking glass. Cleaning up afterward is undignified.”
“Is this literal or metaphoric?”
Lydia looked at me a long time, then she sighed. “Sam, all your life I’ve never been able to decide if you walk around with your head in the clouds or up your ass.”
***
Hank balanced on the truck’s back bumper to strap a blue tarp over the amassed possessions. Even though Lydia’s saddle purse and bottle of water were already in place in the front seat, ready to take to the highway, this driving into the sunset thing still didn’t seem real to me, I guess because it’s hard to conceive of your mother as a fugitive from justice.
“Wait a day so you don’t miss Pete’s funeral,” I said.
Lydia had found a blue-and-yellow necktie left over from her Annie Hall phase. She held the folded tie up to my neck to check the color coordination between it and my skin. “I never was much for funerals,” she said. “Tell Maurey and Chet we’re sorry we couldn’t be there.”
I appealed to Hank. “What’s a day going to matter?”
Hank grunted from the strain of tightening the rope around the tarp.
Lydia said, “Women’s prisons are grossly underfunded. They must be avoided at all costs.” She stuffed the necktie into my coat pocket. “Have Maurey tie it, you’ll botch the job if you do it yourself.”
This was happening too fast. It seemed wrong to have finally made up with my mother, sort of, anyway, and fifteen minutes later lose her for God knows how long. We should be bonding or interfacing or whatever being nice is called these days.
She said, “Leaving you in charge of the house doesn’t mean some woman can waltz in here and change everything. I want the walls where I left them.”
“I’m done with women.”
“I’ll believe that when moose fly.”
Then Lydia did something completely uncharacteristic. She hugged me. I felt her head on my shoulder and her arms on my back. She was thinner than I’d imagined, and she smelled a bit like ink.
“Take care of yourself out there in the underground,” I said.
She leaned back with her hands on my elbows and looked into my face. “I’ll be fine. The government’s not big enough to touch women like me. You take care of my granddaughter.”
“I will.”
“Promise me you won’t raise her the way I raised you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
After Lydia got into the truck, Hank came around and hugged me too. It didn’t feel a bit weird.
“Feed the horses while I’m gone,” he said.
“Maurey’s not going to be happy,” I said.
“You’ll have to take my place.”
“Yeah, right.”
Hank grinned. “Nach-ki-tach-sa-po-auach-kach-pinna.”
“What’s that?”
“Blackfoot for ‘Keep your nose clean.’”
I stood in the snow, watching Hank’s truck slowly drive away. Just before he turned west onto the Yellowstone Highway, an arm came from the passenger’s window, fingers fluttered a good-bye wave, then they were gone.
6
Maurey was more than unhappy over Hank going underground with Lydia.
“We’re talking last straw,” she said.
I stood there, hands at my sides, wondering how I could save her. These crises are the times I’m supposed to take command.
Anger flashed in her eyes. “Who’s going to run the ranch?”
“It could be worse. I’ve lost my mother. Temporarily anyway.”
“I need Hank a lot more than you need a mother.”
That was true. At my age, a mother is more symbolic than nurturing, not that mine ever was nurturing. “I can help with the ranch.”
Maurey made a nasal sound indicating minor disgust. “Sam, this is a horse ranch; you’re afraid of horses.”
I hate it when people say that. “The ranch isn’t only a horse ranch. I can fix fence, and I’ve always wanted to learn irrigation. Moving water where it’s needed seems like a satisfying way to spend your time.”
Maurey sat in her stuffed rocking chair and stared at a spot in the air several feet in front of and slightly below her face. She said, “I have to call my sponsor.”
“Your sponsor?”
“Go find Pud. He needs your help in the hay shed.”
“Are you turning
to God?” I asked.
“I’m turning to the telephone. You go help Pud and don’t come back for a couple of hours.”
Here’s my problem with Pud: Today, he seems nice enough and Maurey loves him and she’s past that stage women go through where they fall in love with creeps, so he must be okay, but way back when Pud was seven or eight his mother told him to drown a litter of kittens. As an alternative to drowning, Pud decided to let his God-ugly dog kill them. Maurey and I came upon the gory scene, there was a fight, the dog bit me, I bit the dog, and in the end we saved one kitten. That kitten was Alice, my closest pal for the next eighteen years.
Okay. Pud had excuses. He was only a child and his family was a bunch of ignorant yahoos, and back then everyone thought Pud was retarded so they treated him cruelly. I understand the excuses; but the fact is I can’t forget he once fed kittens to a dog. That was the same winter Lydia told me the rape story. People who can’t forget lead fetid lives.
I found Pud in the barn, grooming the stud.
“Molly’s in the hay,” Pud said. “We fed her three Marches ago when the snow was nose deep and the elk were starving, and now she thinks we owe her lunch all winter.”
“She’s a welfare chiseler elk,” I said.
“There’s a lesson to be learned, I guess.”
As Pud and I walked in silence up the sled track to the shed, it dawned on me for the hundredth time that I owed it to Maurey to be friends with him. Or, at least, friendly. They’d been together six years and Pud and I had yet to carry on a conversation between just the two of us.
I wasn’t certain where to begin. “Pud,” I said, “how’d you come to get into the satellite dish repair business?”
He was as surprised to hear me ask as I was to be asking. He kind of slid the corners of his eyes at me to see if I was putting him on. “Maurey and I were up the Ramshorn one July, delivering horses to the Bar Double R, and they had a dish. I didn’t even know what it was.”
“And that’s how you decided on a career?”
“I decided on a career when I saw eight full-grown cowboys hanging on every word of Jeopardy. Those old men had lived long, happy lives without TV, but three weeks after putting in the dish, they were junkies.”
“So, you look at your job as servicing junkies?”
“Heck, you should see the panic when a bandpass filter goes down. I charge seventy an hour, including travel time, which can be four or five hours back in the mountains.”
This was a bigger scam than golf carts.
“I could get two hundred if I wanted,” Pud said, “but that would be gouging.” He slid his eyes over at me again. “I’m no gouger.”
“I believe you.”
The hay shed wasn’t a shed in the North Carolina sense of the word. It was actually a large roof, larger than the roof on most houses, held up by telephone pole-looking logs about twenty feet high. The summer’s hay crop—or in drought years like this one, hay bought from Idaho farmers—was stacked in bales under the roof to keep dry, and a twelve-foot double-posted mesh fence surrounded the hay to keep out horses, porcupines, deer, moose, and elk, and anything else with a taste for grass.
The system worked fairly well except when someone forgot to close the gate properly, which is what happened the day Pete died. An elk—Molly—had gone through the fence and was eating her way around the stack, costing the ranch money it didn’t have to spare.
Pud stationed me just inside the open gate, which wasn’t any more a real gate than the shed was a real shed. It was a section of fence held in by push screws. Each side of the enclosure had a removable section so Hank could take bales from anywhere without having a long haul.
“Stand here and when she comes your way, turn her out the open hole,” Pud said.
“Turn her?”
“Only don’t get under her feet. Molly’s stomped three cow-dogs to death in her career.”
“How do I turn her without getting under her feet?”
“Wave your arms and holler.”
“She’s bigger than me.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
Pud walked off counterclockwise around the hay bales. From the northwest corner, Molly raised her head and chewed a mouthful of hay. She regarded me disdainfully—with good reason. She was wild, strong, and noble. I wasn’t. That animal knew I wasn’t bigger than her. She wasn’t stupid.
I looked across the white pasture to the river and wondered idly if I was fixing to get killed. The thought didn’t disturb me as much as I would have expected. Mostly, I considered the uniqueness in a modern society of being killed by a wild animal. I always wanted to go out in a unique way. I also thought about how lousy Shannon would feel. She would wonder if her desertion last night caused me to flaunt risks.
“Scat! Move it!” Pud’s voice came from around the corner of the stack.
Molly ignored him. Six-hundred-pound animals don’t respond to Scat.
A firecracker exploded at Molly’s feet. Pop. She jumped back and hit the fence, but didn’t move any closer to me. A string of firecrackers went off—Pop! Pop! PopPop! Molly walked ten feet or so down the aisle toward me, enough to clear the line of fire, then she stopped and went back to feeding.
Pud appeared on the far side of the elk. “Black Cats aren’t motivational enough,” he said.
By leaning toward the fence, I could see him working something out of his coat pocket. Pud is wiry and no taller than me. I’d always thought Maurey didn’t love me in the romantic way because I wasn’t tall, so it came as a shock when she took a boyfriend my size.
“Pud,” I said, “when we were kids, everyone thought you were retarded. Why was that?”
He stopped fiddling with whatever he’d been fiddling with and looked at me. “I’m dyslexic.”
His eyes have always been so soft and open, not angry like Dothan’s, that I used to suspect something other than a demented home life made him different.
He went on. “I couldn’t learn to read. My family and everyone treated me like a retard, so I believed them.”
“I remember how mean the kids were to you at school.”
“Maurey had me tested. All those years I thought I was stupider than everyone else, and then I found out I wasn’t.”
“Must have had an amazing effect on your self-image.”
“Like waking up and discovering you’re a different person.” He held up a round object. “You ready?”
“For what?”
“Cherry bomb.”
I glanced from him to Molly. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Her nose reacted first. The nostrils flared and her head jerked, then BLAM!—thirty times louder than a Black Cat. She leaped backward into the fence and bounced and came down running. I doubt if Molly even saw me before the collision. Her eyes were panicky wild, bugging pink whites and huge pupils. It happened way too fast for me to wave my hands and holler, or be smart and climb the fence. I think her inside shoulder hit me; whatever it was, I flew into the hay and she went out the fence gap.
Pud pulled me to my feet. “That was great,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have stood my ground like you did.”
After a few minutes, my lungs accepted air and my vision cleared somewhat. I almost convinced myself I’d been brave from choice; maybe I did stand my ground; maybe I had had time to jump. Bravery isn’t what you do so much as how you look back at what you did. I was so happy about surviving Molly, I tripped over barbwire under the snow and cut the living bejesus out of my hand.
***
So I walked into the living room with my fist above my head, clenching a hard-packed snowball. The blood trickled down my arm and off my elbow.
Maurey was still on the phone. She took one look at me and said, “I have to go, Lloyd, there’s another emergency.” She listened a few seconds and said, “I’ll call you back.”
After she hung up I said, “You didn’t have to stop on account of me.”
“I’m supposed to cha
t while you bleed on the floor?”
Maurey got up and led me into the kitchen, where she kept one of the most complete first-aid kits a nonprofessional ever owned. It filled an old army mule pannier. A lot of doctors must have dried out on the TM because Maurey was prepared for any emergency. She had me stand at the sink and run cold water over the cut. It was at the base of my thumb and hard to see, what with the flow of blood, but there seemed to be a penny-size skin flap over a deep, ragged hole.
“This’ll take stitches,” Maurey said.
“Should we call an ambulance?”
“I can handle it.”
She dug through the pannier and came up with a sealed Baggie containing a sponge and this frothy brown liquid. As she leaned over my hand, her hair fell across her line of vision and she brushed it back over her ear in my favorite Maurey gesture.
“Was that your sponsor on the phone?” I asked.
She nodded. “Lloyd. Have you had a tetanus shot lately?”
“Last year when a Vicksburg battery mount fell on my foot. Am I supposed to know Lloyd?”
“Yes, you dip.” The brown liquid was some kind of alcohol and it hurt like the dickens. I gritted my teeth as Maurey scrubbed and talked. “I’ve told you about Lloyd and Sharon Carbonneau at least twenty times. They own a sports paraphernalia shop in Denver.”
Even though the pain was tremendous, I resolved to follow the expected male code of toughness. “Sports paraphernalia?”
“Caps and coolers. You can make a killing off any piece of plastic with a Denver Broncos logo on the side.”
“‘Sponsor’ is an AA term, isn’t it?”
“Your sponsor is the person you turn to when you’re in trouble.”
“That makes you my sponsor.”
She gave one last squeeze of brown antiseptic. “Are you still in trouble, sugar booger?”
Was I in trouble, or was this despair the daily routine of going on? “Shannon’s moving out,” I said.
