by Tim Sandlin
Holding my sterile hand palm up, Maurey led me back to the kitchen table. “I know.”
“She always tells you everything before me.”
Maurey found a preloaded syringe and broke off the seal. “Shannon’s worried. She thinks you’ll fall apart without her at home to fuss over.”
I stared at the syringe. Nobody had told me about a shot. “What did you advise?”
“I said, ‘Birds gotta fly.’ If you fall apart that’s your fault. She can’t spend her whole life being needy so you have something to do.”
When Shannon was little we had this ritual where I came in every night to tuck her into bed. The covers would be an awful mess and I would say, “What would you do without me?” and she would say, “Freeze in my sleep,” or something to that effect. But then one night I went into her room in my socked feet and found her reading Yertle the Turtle in a perfectly tucked bed. She didn’t see me at the door, so I returned to my room, put on shoes, and clumped back up the hall. When I re-entered Shannon’s bedroom, the covers were tangled up around her feet.
I couldn’t decide if the trick to make me feel needed was touching or manipulative. Either way, finding out the truth took some of the glow off night-night.
“This may sting,” Maurey said, and she stabbed me right in the cut.
“Aighgh! Jesus!”
“What a wienie,” she said.
“Wienie? Let me poke a hole in you and see how it feels.”
“Hank didn’t scream when I deadened his wrist.”
“Hank’s stoic. It runs in his genes.”
“Wieniehood runs in your genes. That’ll numb up in a minute.”
My pain threshold has never been up to cowboy standards. The Callahan nerves are more sensitive than theirs, I think. Some people can see or hear better than other people, it only follows that senses of touch vary also, and mine is highly developed.
“Doctors just give you all these medical supplies?”
“They leave things with me when they go away.”
Another plastic bag held a curved needle, like cobblers use on shoe soles, pre-threaded from a little bobbin of nylon thread. I said, “A doctor recovers from alcoholism and he’s so grateful he leaves behind a home clinic.”
Maurey held the needle between her thumb and index finger as she studied my cut. “Actually, this particular doctor committed suicide.”
She slid the needle into the flap and pulled it out of clean skin. It felt icky. No pain—just icky, like the ultimate in fingernails across a blackboard. “He couldn’t live with or without alcohol,” she went on, “so he hung himself in the barn.”
“And you kept his stuff.”
Maurey tied a complicated knot by dipping the needle through a loop and turning it sideways or something. I couldn’t follow the process. Afterward she snipped the thread and went back into my thumb for a second stitch.
Without looking up, she said, “Pud asked me to marry him.”
“Ouch!”
“Don’t jerk your hand while the needle’s in it.”
“You purposely waited until I was helpless to break the news.”
“I was going to tell you. He only asked last night.”
“I hope you said no.”
Maurey drew the thread through and tied the knot. She pretended to be concentrating so hard I knew she wasn’t concentrating at all. She could easily have sewn my fingers together.
“I said okay.”
“Okay? The kid asks you to marry him and all you can say is ‘Okay.’ Isn’t that a bit halfhearted?”
“Don’t be tacky with me, Sam.”
“But you already married one Talbot and he was a shit.”
“I’ve got the good brother this time.”
Maurey and I had been best friends since before puberty. I thought we would always be the way we had always been, with our romantic lives a hobby we take seriously, but nevertheless, still a hobby. The nuclear family would always be each other.
“You’ve lived with Pud for years. Why change what works?”
Maurey pulled the third stitch. “Why are you freaking out?”
“I think he’s taking advantage of your vulnerability over losing Pete.”
She tied the knot hard and snipped the loose end with her scissors in a crisp snip of anger.
“You’ve been married twice.”
“But that was different. Neither of those women was as vital to me as you are.”
“And they knew that. I don’t blame them for hating me. Did it ever occur to you that maybe—just maybe—putting me first over your wives had something to do with why your marriages failed?”
“They were both emotional cripples. It had nothing to do with you.”
Maurey’s eyes met mine fiercely. “Pud is my partner, Sam. My mate. You are my very good friend. You are important, yet secondary.”
“But we always said friends matter more than lovers.”
“You always said that. Pud is the number-one man in my life, Sam. You have to accept that.”
“Fat chance.”
7
I kicked on my cross-country skis and headed up the creek. Got to get away. Got to go. Movement eases turmoil. The warm days earlier in the week had softened the snow and today’s cold hardened it, so basically I was skiing on ice. I fell twice before the back fence. A single rail showed above the snow and it was easy to sidestep over. Once across, I made my way into the aspens, where the going was a bit easier.
How could she do this to me? When I got married I didn’t flaunt my true love in her face. I didn’t call her secondary. The first time I sent a postcard: “Got married. Wish you were here.” The second time, Shannon told her.
When Wanda ran off with the illiterate pool man I thought I had a rock-solid support system—mother, daughter, closest friend—stable as a three-legged stool. Okay, the mother wasn’t too supportive, but I knew where she was. If I felt like talking to her, all I had to do was hold on to a check for a couple of days. I never dreamed Shannon would leave so soon. Maybe if I’d stayed in Greensboro after the Katrina fiasco she wouldn’t have discovered how easy I am to live without.
What was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to North Carolina. The Manor House would be an empty tomb without Shannon. Besides, I’d had it with golf carts and serial sex. Gilia changed all that.
For sure, I couldn’t stay in my cell at the TM Ranch forever. Spring would come; Madame Bovary would eat arsenic and die; Maurey would marry Pud.
What I ought to do was move to a small Western town and find a log cabin within walking distance of a video store and a coffee shop, and do nothing for ten years but write novels. Not teenage sports fiction, but literature—Death in Steamboat Springs, Bucky Redux, a rewrite of the New Testament. I would be as serious as Richard Ford. Psychiatrists and doctors take sick people and bring them up to normal. I could take normal and make it better. My readers would stop being miserable; they would tolerate themselves and each other.
Or if that was too ambitious, I could bring Babs and Lynette to Wyoming and set them up with their own Dairy Queen. They’d like that.
The options were boundless. Almost too boundless, like the night I was left alone at the ranch and I tried to watch satellite TV. Four hundred channels gave me so many choices I spent the entire evening switching from satellite to satellite and didn’t watch anything for fear of missing something. When all choices are possible, realistic and unrealistic lose their edges. Here I was torn between writing a book that would make unhappy people happy and opening a Dairy Queen.
When had I been happy in life? When Maurey was pregnant. When Shannon was young and needed me. Looking back at the recent past, I realized helping Babs and Lynette had given me a gut-level satisfaction that had been missing lately from Young Adult novels and sex acts on lost women.
I was almost to the warm springs when I came through a gap in the aspens into a wide clearing covered by virgin snow, and I had a vision. Maybe not a vision in the Cheyenne s
ense, more like a waking dream—a visualization. It wasn’t something I could ever tell Maurey or Shannon about. They would laugh. Lydia would hoot.
What I saw was a log lodge with a rock chimney next to a white clinic. Individual cabins lay scattered around the clearing connected by smooth paths. Golf carts hummed quietly back and forth between the cabins and the main lodge, carrying my women. A long driveway lined by cottonwoods and red willows looped up from the ranch. At a quaint wooden bridge spanning the brook, a tastefully small sign read Callahan Home for Unwed Mothers.
Why not? I could hire nurses. We’d need a helicopter for hospital runs, but, hell, I had money. Nothing on Earth sounded nicer than to surround myself with pregnant teenagers.
***
A doughnut of green clover about three feet wide encircles the warm springs all winter. The north side of the doughnut is the actual spring, which steams from the earth like a scene from Shakespeare—one of those Scottish moors haunted by witches. The hot water gurgles into a moss-lined pool, thigh deep at its deepest point, then, already cooling, it empties west into Miner Creek. The Miner Creek approach involves skiing across a log high above the rocks and ice, so my rest and meditation spot was on the east side, the gentle bank.
I popped boots off bindings and planted my skis upright in the snow, then I sat on the clover and waited. I didn’t touch the water. When you first start visiting a warm springs on a regular basis, you check the temperature each time you return to see if the water really is as warm as you remember it. The TM spring was a tad cooler than I like bath water, warm enough to melt the surrounding snow but not so hot as to scald the tropical fish Maurey and other kids had released into it over the years. Back in early high school Maurey talked me into a full-moon skinny dip at twenty below zero. The water itself was cozy, warm and foggy as a Jacuzzi, but the seconds between leaving the water and drying off were among the most painful of my childhood. Seeing her naked was not worth hypothermia.
I came to the warm springs mainly for the dirt. Winter in Jackson Hole may be beautiful and spare beyond the Eastern Time Zone conception of beauty, but several months with no sight of dirt leaves me weird.
So I sat on the clover with my fingers in the dirt, watching tiny goldfish dart around the shallows’ muck, my energy at an all-time low. I was too exhausted to be depressed. The truth is I’m only good for one intense, spine-wrenching emotional blowout a year, and when the scenes come stacked up on one another some sort of morphine response kicks in. My brain goes numb; my muscles fill up with lactic acid.
The high whine of a snowmobile wafted in from back along the fenceline, and I realized I’d been holding my breath, waiting for it. Maurey arrived in a powder blue snowsuit, gold metal-flake helmet, and her father’s old Mickey Mouse boots. I averted my eyes as she dismounted. I heard her shake out her hair and wade down the snowbank, then felt her sit beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. I underhand tossed a pebble into the water and we both took what life lessons we could from the concentric, spreading ripples.
“You knew I would come,” she said.
“Yes.”
Our shoulders were a half-inch apart. I sat cross-legged while Maurey stretched her legs in a V. She leaned back on her hands and said, “Remember the day I fell in the creek and went into labor?”
“I’ve never been that scared since.” Maurey broke her leg, Shannon was born, and I became a father three weeks before my fourteenth birthday.
Maurey exhaled a sigh. The fog from her breath looked like punctuation. “Sam, it’s time we got a divorce.”
I said, “I know. It’s a pain in the ass.”
Maurey pulled off her left glove and laced her fingers into mine. “You think you’re incapable of loving a woman, and you blame Lydia, but maybe the problem isn’t her, maybe it’s my fault.”
“You’re honest with me, I’m honest with you. How could there be a problem?”
“There’s worse things than dishonesty, Sam.”
My automatic response was cynical, but I clamped down before it got out.
Maurey said, “Ever since we were kids, we’ve had each other, so neither of us has had to learn how to take care of ourselves.”
A flock of small black birds twittered through the willows across the creek, making the bushes seem to crawl in a DT effect. I looked from the birds to the fish to Maurey’s hand in mine.
“I have this test I give myself,” I said, “whenever I fall for a new woman. I pretend she and I are about to be married. The families are there in their best clothes, the minister stands with his back to the cross, the organist breaks into the ‘Wedding March,’ and you telephone to ask if I want to go out for coffee.”
“Why wasn’t I invited to the wedding?”
“If I say no to you, I don’t want to go for coffee right now, it proves I’m serious about the woman. Falling for her is for real.”
There was a moment’s quiet, then Maurey said, “That’s either silly or sick. Give me a minute to decide which.” She used her right hand, the hand I wasn’t holding, to brush hair behind her ear. “Tell me, how many have you married in this fantasy?”
“None. Not even the two I married in reality.”
“That is not silly. It is definitely sick.”
A face appeared in the steam over the spring—a face with high cheekbones and a freckle between the bridge of the nose and her right eye. I said, “Gilia.”
“What?”
“I’d rather marry Gilia than go to coffee with you.” I tossed a handful of pebbles, many concentric and overlapping circles. “But I blew that one.”
Maurey and I went into our respective funks. It seemed to me that we were embarking on something inordinately stupid. We were chopping up our one dependable crutch. Friendship is so much healthier than other crutches—alcohol or TV or religious fanaticism. One healthy crutch shouldn’t be against the rules.
“What exactly does this divorce mean?” I asked. “Are we still friends?”
She squeezed my hand hard, then let go. “Of course we’re still friends. It just means we’re no longer next of kin. We no longer save each other every time there’s a crisis. The next woman breaks your heart, you have to handle it without me.”
“There won’t be a next woman.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m finished with romance.”
“You could no more do without romance than air.”
I decided not to fight with her. This would be a conversation to dwell on in my old age. I didn’t want to dwell on a fight.
“What else?” I asked.
Maurey leaned toward the warm springs. “I can’t accept any more of your money.”
Dothan’s ugly taunts ran through my mind. The gossip I’d heard and ignored. The fears I’d been afraid to think.
I looked at her. “Is money all you used me for?”
Maurey swung her right arm and punched me in the face.
“Ow!”
“How dare you say that, you snot. When Daddy died and Dothan took Auburn, I’d never have survived without you.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“This split-up is just as hard on me as it is on you, you stupid jerk.”
I held both hands over my nose. “You hurt me.”
“I meant to hurt you.”
“Is my nose bleeding?”
She tipped my face to view the damage. “Six stitches should do it. Maybe seven.”
I looked down at my hands. No blood. “Before we go apart, would you do me one last favor?” I asked.
“It better have nothing to do with sex.”
“Let me pay Pete’s bills, the doctors and funeral.”
She frowned. “Wouldn’t that be hypocritical? To say ‘No more—after this last time’?”
“It’s as much for Pete and Chet as it is for you.”
She regarded me with her blue eyes. The first time I saw Maurey I was amazed at her blue eyes and black hair—like Hitler. Twenty years of history passed b
etween us as we stared at one another. Twenty years of shared parenthood. I couldn’t believe it was over, we would be casual from now on.
Maurey nodded once, to herself, and smiled. She said, “Okay.”
8
A letter arrived the next morning:
Dear Mr. Callahan,
Rory Paseneaux returned to claim his position as head of the household and he is PO’ed because me and Babs named you as the father of our babies. He went so far as to talk to the woman at the hospital and she told him it is too late to change the papers.
Rory has said we can not have any more to do with you, even me, and if you come around he will kick your butt.
We also can not cover for you with your girlfriends any more. We have to call Sam and Sammi by their middle names which are Lynn and Babs.
So that is that. I thank you for what you did for us and I know Babs would too if she was allowed.
With respects,
Lynette Norloff
P.S. Rory Paseneaux did allow one thing. He says your lawyer can keep paying our rent.
Something kind of nasty happened before Pete’s funeral. I was standing outside the Episcopal Church, on the sidewalk that had been cleared by a snow blower, talking to Chet and three of Pete’s friends from New York City while Maurey and Pud parked the Suburban. The friends were nice-looking young men in New York City suits and shoes. I got the feeling they had been Ivy Leaguers because I couldn’t tell them apart.
Dothan Talbot drove past, slowly, with the Denver bimbo scooted so close she was behind the steering wheel. He stared at me in this challenging look of his where he lowers his pointy chin and glares out the tops of his eyeballs. That look used to make Lauren Bacall incredibly alluring, but it did nothing at all for Dothan.
I ignored him and went on talking to the New Yorkers about the color of snow in Manhattan and the odds of them seeing a bear. One of the guys said it’s not the temperature that makes you cold, it’s the humidity. Chet lit a cigarette. Pretty soon Dothan cruised back the other way. The bimbo had a possessive scowl on her face, probably because married women fooling around are the most jealous creatures on Earth. I didn’t envy Dothan a bit.
