A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  Having sex, like getting transferred, is something that other guys seem to do. There have been times when I thought the stars in the sky would rattle with sex, and the moon would fall climaxing into the desert, but it never quite happened, and I find myself in the morning with a lingering disappointment and a memory that doesn’t explain why.

  There is one girl, a doctor’s daughter, who I like, but she hasn’t given me a tumble so far.

  I have heard guys, whether speaking in cut New York accents, barracks drawl, or cowboy twang, all speak the same thing, of their times with their imaginations, of the rooms and women behind their eyes in the night-black, moving their bodies with the rhythms of their appetites and sweating with the fever of their wishfulness, dancing with Mary Palm until they can sigh within that made-up picture of some delicious girl, on some luscious bed in some plush room, and then smile until sleep comes.

  But the lessons of Sister Stella still stay with me most of the time.

  When she wasn’t knuckling us under the chin, she told us that there is little difference between the thought and the deed.

  I suppose we can’t hide anything from God. But even if I could, I would want to apply all this sexual thinking to someone I really care about, someone I love, and so far I just haven’t met anyone like that.

  The hugging part isn’t bad, though, and I keep hoping.

  I have come close to actual sex out here in the Nevada desert.

  There is a place called the Sally J Mustang Ranch, about forty miles from Fallon, where my friend Bub Williams says you can get anything you want for fifteen dollars. I have done a lot of work for Bub’s dad, who has a small ranch, and I stay with them from time to time.

  I am laughing now as I am getting closer and closer to the cows, because, not long ago, Bub, Ike Hiibel, a few of the fellas, and I drank a couple of cases of beer out in the boondocks, and then, legless, we went to a town hall dance, where the sailors and airmen were out to have a good time, the cowboys were hootin’ it up good, and both groups were eyeing each other like the farmers and the cowboys in Oklahoma!

  I was with the cowboy group.

  I danced a few two-steps, and when we went back to the car for a few more beers, Bub began talking about driving down to Sally J’s place in Fernley. I know that this is famous for being the only legalized whorehouse in America. Guys even drive up from Las Vegas to go to it.

  “It’s like heaven,” Bub said. “The women come out in underclothes. They line up, and they tell you their names. And you go up to one you like. Right there in her bra and panties she holds out her hand for a shake and says, ‘Hi, my name is Blossom.’ And if you like her, you just wink, and she takes you to her room and washes you with warm water before you just lie there like a stud horse and you try to make a ribbon-winning colt.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said. Except for that time with Loretta, I never before thought about getting passionately close to a woman without taking her out, or getting to know her and her family, or spending all your money on movies and hamburgers, or riding out to the boondocks where you can be alone under the stars. One, two, three and you are in bed with a woman. It sounds like something you can only do when the lights are out and you are alone in your bed before sleep, and you can make anyone and everyone do anything you want.

  But this was no daydream, no fantasy. I was ready to go to Sally J’s and see if I could just do it, just lie there and try to make a ribbon-winning colt.

  “You go get the guys in the dance,” Bub said, “and I’ll get some more beer from the trunk.”

  I staggered a little when I got out of the car and bumped into a swabbie I had seen once or twice at the navy base, a big guy with a mustache from sideburn to sideburn. He was just coming out of the dance, and I think he just saw the cowboy shirt I was wearing. “Sorry,” I said to him. He didn’t care about my apology. He just swung a roundhouse at me and ripped open the top of my lip, just beneath my nose.

  I got up and ran at him, but all of a sudden there were ten sailors in the parking lot, and five guys were holding me.

  The next thing I knew I was on an operating table at the base hospital, and the doctor was stiching me closed with a half-moon needle. I remember sitting there, feeling the needle go through my skin, wincing at the pain, thinking that I have never started a fight in my life, and yet I seem to have been in more of them than is natural. But in this one I barely had a chance to even raise my dukes. So I can’t call it a fight so much as a testament to sailors’ impatience.

  What great heaps of anger must get filled up in people’s minds that they can lash out so unpredictably like this? It makes me think that when we are driving down the Nevada highways at seventy miles an hour, there are guys as angry as this swabbie on the other side of the road, and there is nothing but a painted white line on the ground that is separating us.

  I never met that guy again, but I see his punch every time I shave around the scar on my lip, and it reminds me of how close I came to visiting the only legalized whorehouse in the United States.

  Just another if, and I will never know what it was like.

  But, still, maybe I should count my blessings.

  Patches begins to shift in his steps as we get closer to the calves because he knows he will have to start running as soon as we get them riled.

  “Whoa,” I say, and I pat his neck, which calms him a little. But not much. Horses are too excitable to calm completely. If a cow got caught in a roll of barbed wire, she will just stand there until some providence sets her free, but a horse will tear its leg off to get free. I think that is why I like Patches so much, because he won’t just settle into anything I want him to do. I have to work at it.

  This thought makes me think of my mother because I would not own Patches if she didn’t come through a year ago.

  “How much do you need?” she asked, and I could imagine her looking for a place to sit down as she carried the big black phone around the living room, the phone the telephone company gave her as an employee benefit after a year of working.

  “It’s a lot of money, Mom, but I really need it.”

  “What do you need it for?”

  “I want to buy a horse.”

  There was a long pause. She must have been laughing, with her hand over the phone, or else she was trying to put part of a puzzle together.

  “Dennis,” she said, “people from 56th Street don’t buy horses. They buy tickets to the circus if they want to see a horse.”

  “C’mon, Mom,” I answered her. “I really want it, and I can pay you back, honest.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred for the horse.”

  “What?”

  “And another fifty for the saddle.”

  “A saddle? Do you really need a saddle?”

  “I need the saddle, Mom.”

  “The Indians never use a saddle. Don’t you go to the movies?”

  “Well,” I answered, trying to contain my joy, because I know she would never joke unless she was willing. “I just found out that the Irish from 56th Street always use saddles. That’s the way it is. I read it in a book.”

  I heard her begin to cough as she laughed, a deep cough that I knew was cutting into her chest.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” I know she smokes too much, and no one gets colds as hard to live with as she does. And she is now near fifty and never gets any exercise.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “It’s the stairs. I just came up and I need to rest a little, is all. So did you pay Marty off?”

  “Completely, Mom. I sent the last ten dollars a few months ago.”

  Marty Trainor was very good about the late payments, too, I thought. They should make every lawyer memorize the pages of that guy’s life.

  The cows are beginning to sense us walking toward them, and they begin to shuffle some. I see a veal calf sucking at a cow, but I can’t make out the brand on her side. I’ll have to get a little closer to see if it’s Dave Iverson’s double crossed bars,
which looks something like a drunken tic-tac-toe drawing.

  I miss my mother and brother, and being part of a family, and lately I have been thinking about going home. I can always sell Patches and my saddle to raise the airplane fare to New York, and maybe there will be a little left over to pay my mother the rest of what I owe her.

  If I stay here, I will just, well, get by, from day to day, without any plan. But in New York maybe I can get my old job at Catholic Charities back, or even at the florist. Something will work out.

  And since I passed all the GED tests, maybe I can get into a college and learn something that might give me a leg up on things.

  Sure, I’ve been reading tons, like my brother said, and Father O’Rourke, too. All the works of Sinclair Lewis, J. P. Marquand, Eugene O’Neill, James T. Farrell, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, and anyone whose style of writing appeals to me. If I like one book, I try to read everything that author wrote, so that I get to remember how the writing flows from one voice to another.

  But that and fifteen cents will get me on the subway, something my mother used to say.

  Literature will not help me when I am trying to get a job. It doesn’t matter how many books you have under your belt if you don’t have that diploma.

  Anyway, there are no jobs in Fallon, Nevada, except what I am doing. In New York, maybe I can become a teacher, or a cop or a fireman.

  Or, as Sister Stella used to say to the class, “You can all become president of the United States, but you need to get in a good high school.”

  None of the girls in the class ever told her that all the presidents seem to be men.

  I came pretty close to serious, lifelong trouble when I was hanging around with the guys on 55th Street. But I also know I have been drinking too much beer out here, and I am beginning to feel about beer what I feel about drugs. It comes with trouble, and trouble comes with it.

  There are only three streets in Fallon, and one of them is filled with gambling casinos, where, like the bars, you have to be twenty-one to get in. Because it is a navy town, there are SPs, who are like MPs, on shore patrol at all hours on the streets, and one thing about them is that they think all the airmen have it too easy and are easy prey in an idle night’s work.

  I got picked up twice by the same SPs, was put in the back of the patrol wagon and taken to my barracks. Each time, they said I was drinking alcohol as a minor, and drunk. And they filed a complaint with my commander.

  Maybe I was drunk, but I thought you had to be disorderly, too, to get charged. I was certainly having a good time in town, and they may have seen me walking in a crooked line, but I know I never started any trouble. Those SPs just saw me as trouble, like I was wearing a banner on my sleeve. Another New York City kid.

  The commander filed the complaints under “Airman drinking under age” and confined me to the barracks for a week each time. It was a kind of fine. You’re out having a good time, the SPs nab you, you pay the dues.

  But the third time was like they were picking on me. It was like Shalleski was punching me on First Avenue again. I just wasn’t going to let them pick me up every time they saw me on the street.

  I was always drinking beer.

  And when you drink beer, you usually get drunk. That is what guys in the military do on their time off. I guess I would have done the same thing if I got transferred to Bermuda.

  For some reason, I just wasn’t growing up.

  Maybe I 0could have cared more about my job, or not been late for every single thing I was scheduled for, or been more snappy in my salutes to the commander, but drinking beer in my time off was my business, and I wasn’t going to let these SPs pick me up again without giving them a hard time.

  They said I punched them, but I didn’t. I just twisted myself out of their grip, one on each side of me, by flailing my arms and moving faster than my brother Billy, faster than they could comprehend, the way I did as a kid when I got into a problem. They couldn’t hold me, and they pushed me to the ground and sat on me until the patrol wagon came.

  This time my commander did not settle for a complaint. Resisting a direct order by a Shore Patrol was punishable by another Article 15 discipline, and the commander sent me to Hamilton Air Force Base for an evaluation.

  The officers there looked at my two Article 15s and my other two altercations with the SPs, and decided that while I was not an undesirable person in the military, neither was I filling the ideals of the air force, and so they gave me an honorable discharge. It was like they were saying, “No hard feelings, but we have eight hundred thousand other guys who can do your job.”

  The air force wasn’t happy with me, no doubt about it, and if they didn’t want me around anymore, at least they were giving me the benefit of the doubt by laying me off and giving me a good discharge. This is fair, and it is also a little bit of good luck.

  And so here I am without any more excuses.

  No more ifs. It was me who didn’t make the bus. It was me who was late for work. It was me who became a slacker after my transfer was redlined. It was me who drank all that beer. It was me who resisted the direct order of the SPs.

  If I have a black and a bleak future, the fault is all mine. I cannot any longer believe that I am a lone figure, like a dolmen on a plain, fighting the elements.

  I have to believe that I have been running after the good times and blaming the bad times.

  But there is a difference between admitting your fault and trying to rectify it. I have to do something. I can’t just live like a trail bum in the Nevada hills. If I go back to New York, at least, I will have my mother, and Monsignor Ford, and Archie, and people who have been “interested” in me, to use Archie’s word. The air force is giving me a clean slate, and now I have to look for a new opportunity to make something of myself.

  I don’t know how many second chances a man can get in this world, but I know I have to ask God for one more.

  I can tell now that Patches has his eye on the calf as well. The calf turns and runs, and I can see the double crossed bars of the cow as she also bolts.

  We are pretty close to them, and I take my rope from over the horn. I grab the honda, my hand firmly over the knot, and swing about six feet of rope our while I throw my spurs into Patches’ rear shanks. He doesn’t need much kicking or encouragement, for he loves to do this, run for a calf across the sandy grass flats. I keep the calf on my right. The little guy runs about half as fast as Patches, and I now have my right hand about two feet down from the knot, holding firm onto the reins and the rest of the rope in my left hand. Patches is running full gallop, and I am yelling “giddap, giddap, yippee” to frighten the calf, to keep it from thinking too much. Yelling and galloping, I am now swinging the rope in moderate, graceful circles until I am five or six feet from the calf, and I let the rope loose, and it flies in circles over the calf’s head and falls onto its shoulder blades, and I pull back fast before he runs through the loop, and the rope falls down and secures around his neck, and I take what rope is left in my right hand and make two fast turns around the saddle horn as I pull back on the reins with all my strength. Patches doesn’t want to stop, which is his biggest problem, and I pull back harder and harder, hoping the reins won’t break, because if a rein breaks, I’ll lose the calf and the rope, and it will take me forever to stop Patches.

  Finally, Patches stops, and the calf gets pulled to the ground by its own momentum.

  I am now patting the horse’s neck, saying “Good boy, good boy,” pulling back gently on the reins so that Patches is keeping the rope taut. I get off the horse and follow the rope down to the calf. It’s a real little guy, maybe two months old. I pick him up, plop him easily onto the grass-patched sand, and pull the knife from my jeans pocket. Two small triangles is all I have to cut from his right ear. People can remove and replace a metal tag, but no one can change an ear mark like that. It is a registered cut, along with Dave’s brand. Now if a federal inspector rides these hills and sees this calf sucking on Dave’s cow, he w
ill also see that the ear mark is Dave’s, too, because no cow will let some strange calf at her teats.

  I take the cuts. The calf does not feel them, for it is dead skin I am cutting. There is a lot of whining, but the calf lies easily on the ground until I take the rope from around his neck. I can see the cow not far off, and so can the calf. He has a bouncy spring to his gait as he runs to his mother.

  These cows and bulls and calves are closely controlled in this great open and fenceless space. It has been like this for more than a hunded years, and the system works.

  Patches is standing still, my rope hanging limply from the saddle horn alongside him. I grab his reins, pat his neck a few times, and kiss the sweaty top of his nose.

  “Good boy, Patches,” I say as I pull myself back into the saddle and wind the rope in curls over the saddle horn. “There is a calf that won’t get waylaid, anyway. It’s a good system for the cows.”

  Patches seems to nod his head as we continue to walk the hills looking for more of Dave Iverson’s calves.

  I laugh a little. I don’t usually carry on a conversation with Patches, but now I just laugh a little more and say, “If there was a system like this for people, maybe none of us would get lost, huh?”

  Chapter Fifty-three

  My mother was right. There are no good times in a persons life, like in historical periods. Just different times. Or maybe all time is just a series of little difficulties and challenges wedged between big ones, and if you’re lucky, you are able to squeeze as much happiness as is possible between the beginning and the end. The key is to know when you are happy, and I have recently come to think that I know when I am happy.

  It is hard to put into words, but I know.

  When things are going right, I can feel it inside.

  I can feel my soul dancing.

  This is my first week working as a mechanic’s helper in the pipe-fitting shop of the New York Central Railroad, and it is Friday afternoon. I just received my first paycheck, $94 for forty hours’ work, which, when you consider I was making $180 a month in the air force, you can understand why my soul was dancing.