Sex and Sunsets: A Novel

by Tim Sandlin

  June came while I was hospitalized, and with it came the Winnebagos and Airstreams, funny hats and rubber spears, fathers thrown together with families they haven’t seen in fifty weeks, American children without television. People out of their natural element cause chaos.

  I waited five minutes to turn left onto the highway that leads to Grand Teton and Yellowstone—five minutes at an intersection where I usually don’t even slow down. Finally I claimed local-license-plate privilege and cut in front of a Continental. Once in traffic, though, the pace didn’t pick up much. The out-of-towners average three miles an hour, craning their necks to see the sights, taking pictures through rolled-up windows, stopping suddenly to let the kids out while Daddy drives around the block in search of a parking place. Fat chance of finding one.

  I showed tremendous, uncharacteristic patience by not killing myself and as many of them as I could take with me. On the north end of town across from the A&W, a tall girl in jeans and a sweater stood by the road with one thumb hooked in a belt loop and the other thumb pointing toward traffic. I eased in the bug’s clutch and brake and stopped. The guy in the Continental honked rudely.

  “Hi there,” the girl said, sliding into the front seat.

  I moved the gear shift into first, eased back out on the clutch, and pressed on the accelerator. Then I shot something we used to call the bird at the car behind us. “How far you going?” I asked.

  “Colter Bay,” she said, shrugging her body into a comfortable position.

  “You work up there?” I shifted into second.

  “Yep, just started a couple of days ago.” She was a skinny, tall girl, maybe nineteen years old, with short brown hair, probably from Utah.

  “You from Utah?” I asked, skipping third and moving straight into high gear.

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t know. After all these, years of working tourists, I can feel where they’re from. It’s a game most of us locals play. I hardly ever miss. “How do you like working at Colter Bay?” I asked.

  She moved around on the seat to look at me. “It’s fun so far. The boys are awfully immature, though, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know what you mean.” I hadn’t considered what to say to Colette, and this seemed like an important meeting coming up, so I was thinking more about what was fixing to happen than what was happening. I didn’t hear the hitchhiking girl’s next words.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The boys that work for the lodge company. They’re all so young and looking for girlfriends, you know, steady relationships.” She said girlfriends like it was a dirty word. She swept the short, brown bangs out of her face. “I mean, I like to have fun as much as anyone, more even, but I can’t up there because all the boys are so serious and want to get so involved. Besides, they talk and they’ll spoil my reputation. I need a good reputation this summer.”

  “Oh.” I rolled down my window and rested my arm on the open edge.

  “I’d give anything to meet a guy who doesn’t want to get involved. I mean, I’d like a little fun.”

  I reached down and turned on the radio. “Do you know what time it is?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I have an appointment at three o’clock. I would hate to be late for my appointment. I wonder what time it is.” The radio station was playing a song about a Rocky Mountain High. I hummed along.

  “Could I ask you a personal question?” the girl asked.

  “How personal?”

  “It has to do with what you want or don’t want.”

  “Okay, what’s the question?”

  “Do you want a blow job?”

  The song ended and the disc jockey said it was 2:25 and sixty-six degrees. “From you?”

  “Yeah. I’m so frustrated, and I don’t know who I can trust at Colter Bay. I mean, all those boys are so serious.”

  I turned off the radio. “Okay,” I said. It had been a while, and I thought a blow job might make a nice drive through the park even nicer.

  That Utah girl knew her business, all right. Lots of girls just clamp on the end and go at it like a milking machine. Their mouths get all tired and they get cranky if you don’t get off right away, but this girl had read books or something. She treated me like a Popsicle. Started way down at the bottom and tongued her way up, putting on more pressure as she went.

  I felt fine, driving along with one arm out the window, watching the beautiful Teton Mountains and having myself sucked by a connoisseur. I took it as a sign. Everything would be great between Colette and me. We’d be married by the Fourth of July. We could have a picnic and invite my parents. Her parents came out for the first wedding, so I didn’t know if they could fly back for ours or not. I made a note to ask Colette about it.

  There was some confusion at the entrance gate to the park. I was real close to coming and I didn’t want the girl to stop. She had moved up into the gentle end-licking stage, but the gate was right there with a perfect view of my front seat. Twisting around, I grabbed a blanket out of the backseat and threw it over her. Then I eased in the clutch and stopped for the gate. It was my first time in the park since they started collecting entrance fees that summer, so I had to dig around in my pocket, which was about knee level, to find some change. I bought a one-day pass instead of the season pass I’d meant to buy. For a local to buy a one-day pass is a waste of money.

  The girl in the gate station handed me a map of the park and a Johnny Horizon barf bag and said, “Have a nice day.” I don’t think the blanket fooled her.

  A mile or so up the road, I came—came real strong because it had been a while and I must have built up a good load. The girl didn’t swallow it.

  “How was that?” she asked, raising her head. She sounded out of breath.

  “Very good. You do nice work.”

  “Thanks.” She rolled down her window.

  “Do you feel better now?” I asked.

  “Sure do. I think I can make it through the summer if I hitch to town once a week.”

  “I hope so. I know I’ll be glad to give you a lift any time I see you on the road.” We were almost to the Taggart Creek turnoff. “This is my turn,” I said, pushing down the clutch and brake and steering for the right side of the highway.

  “Hey, wait a minute. You’re leaving me out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I have a three o’clock appointment.”

  “How about a few more miles for services rendered?”

  “You said you didn’t want to get involved.”

  The girl called me an asshole and slammed the door. I turned left past a sign that read SERVICE ROAD ONLY, NO ADMITTANCE.

  ***

  I always park in maintenance men’s parking lots instead of the tourists’ lots. It makes me feel a step above the mass.

  Before going off to meet my true love, I pulled up my pants. They were kind of sticky. Then I locked the passenger door, opened my door, and got out. I pushed the lock button on my door and slammed it shut. I tried opening it again to make sure the lock worked.

  The walk up Taggart Creek to the dam is short, maybe a half-mile, and pretty—lots of aspen and early larkspur. I saw a couple of black-capped chickadees and what I thought was a killdeer. They look so much like plovers it’s hard to tell. As I crossed the bridge, the creek sang an old Up With People theme song, then toward the top of the moraine it recited the liner notes from an album called The Patsy Cline Story.

  “She was the hard-luck kid, hillbilly equivalent of Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, and maybe a little Judy Garland. Like all of them, Patsy lived hard, had more than her share of bad luck…”

  A thin shriek whistled down the hill. The creek shut up and we listened as it came again—a ground squirrel in the talons of a hawk perhaps, or mating ravens. Or Colette in trouble.


  I ran up the last of the rise, around a bend in the jeep trail, and straight into a light brown horse tethered to a bearberry bush. The horse whinnied and sidestepped toward the creek. I bounced into the bush.

  “Do you practice these entrances?”

  Colette sat on a rock next to the reservoir with her knees hugged up to her chest. Above the knees, her hands were clutched in the first position of “Here is the church, here is the steeple.”

  “I heard a sound and thought you might be in trouble.” Some of the bearberries had squished onto my clean shirt.

  “A sound?”

  “A squeal.”

  Colette blew into the gap between her thumbs, making the shriek sound.

  “It was you,” I said.

  She laughed, friendly-like, and opened her hands to show me a wide blade of grass stretched into a reed. “My brother taught me this when we were kids. I can still work it.”

  “I always wanted to whistle through grass.”

  “No one ever taught you?”

  I shrugged as if to say no, but that was misleading because my dad spent hours showing me different whistles. My failure was my own fault. By shrugging, I avoided a lie. Lying to her wouldn’t have been right.

  Colette sat watching me as if she expected me to do or say something. I didn’t know what to say. I just stood by the bearberry bush, looking at her. She had on a satiny-looking black shirt and pointy-toed boots the same color as her hair.

  My hands felt awkward. I held the left one with the right one, then I put the right in my pocket and let the left one dangle.

  “I like your horse,” I said.

  Colette smiled. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? I love her so much, I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  As Colette gazed at the horse, I stepped across the clearing, then stopped. The soft expression on her face might mean it was time to take her into my arms, or it might not. Our futures could be ruined if I made my move too soon.

  Colette glanced back at me. “You want to sit down?” She moved over some so there was room for me on the rock. I put my left hand in my other pocket.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The horse.”

  “Dixie.” Colette pulled a strand of hair behind her left ear so I could see the whole ear. It was pierced. There was a hole, but no earring in it.

  “Yeah, Dixie. You told me that over the phone. How’s Doris?”

  “Will you sit down, you look nervous.”

  “I’m not nervous.”

  “Well, I am, this is very peculiar for me.”

  “Why is it peculiar?”

  “Jesus, Kelly, sit down.”

  I sat on the rock next to Colette. The upper parts of our arms were touching. Neither one of us said anything for a while. I think we were both wrapped up in sexual tension.

  Taggart Creek spoke up: “Did you bet on the Dodgers?”

  “Doris thinks she’s got psoriasis,” Colette said.

  “Psoriasis?” I put my hand on her leg, just above the knee.

  “Yeah, she’s scared to tell John.” Colette picked up my hand and set it on my own leg, then let go of it.

  “Why?”

  “John will be mad at her.” Colette shifted to look at the water spilling over the concrete dam. The dam was real small, probably twenty feet across. Branches had piled together across the outlet.

  “Do you love Danny?” I asked.

  Her arm moved. “Could we talk about something else?”

  “What would you like to talk about?”

  “I don’t know, small talk. We hardly know each other.”

  Taggart Creek read aloud, “On this day in history, 1924: At forty, Franz Kafka dies in Kierling, Austria.”

  “Did your brother teach you how to kick a football?” I asked.

  Colette nodded. “I was the first girl in Iowa to win a Punt, Pass, and Kick competition. Would have been the Chicago Bears’ thirteen-year-old champion if I hadn’t shanked my last punt.”

  “Nineteen twenty-six: Poet Allen Ginsberg is born in Newark, New Jersey.”

  “Did you know this is Allen Ginsberg’s birthday?”

  “Who’s Allen Ginsberg?”

  I started a long explanation of Howl and beatniks and the relevance of gay poets in the fifties, but the subject kind of petered out on neo-nihilism. Colette wasn’t listening closely anyway. I made another grab for her hand. She pulled away.

  “Was your brother at the wedding reception?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Where was he? You guys must have been close as kids for him to teach you whistling and kicking and things.”

  “We were close. Dirk was my only pal.” Her eyes turned vulnerable and faraway.

  “So why wasn’t Dirk at the wedding?”

  Colette did the hair-behind-the-ear hand movement again. “Dirk died two years ago, bone cancer in his leg.”

  I watched the water awhile. “Is that why you married Danny?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe you went looking for a replacement.”

  “What are you, a shrink? Listen, Kelly, I know the difference between a brother and a husband.”

  “If you had something really important you wanted to talk about with somebody, who would you want to go to first, Danny or Dirk?”

  “This isn’t small talk, Kelly.”

  “Are you going to leave Danny?”

  “No, I’m not going to leave Danny.” Colette stood up and stepped to the creek bank. “It was nice and peaceful here,” she said. “I was comfortable. Why did you have to start in on me like that?”

  I stood up also. “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  Colette hooked both thumbs in her belt loops and stared up the hill. “So am I.”

  I stood next to her, watching Dixie graze on some kind of weed. A squirrel chattered on the other side of the creek. Above us, a jet left a white vapor trail across a lake-blue sky. Colette’s dead brother changed the situation in some way. All along, I’d been thinking about what she could do for me, how much I needed her. I hadn’t considered that Colette had a past also.

  With her breathing quietly beside me, the entire scenario spread itself out like a made-for-TV movie—the idolized brother dies, leaving a giant hole in pretty Colette’s life, she drifts west to start anew, but the emptiness grows until it’s almost unbearable. Along comes pleasant, polite Danny with his money and family and football letter jacket, volunteering to take care of her, be the things her beloved brother was. Blinded by pain, Colette mistakes gratitude for love and makes a terrible choice to marry Danny. Now she’s stuck, miserable and unhappy, in a promise she can’t keep.

  What a selfish ass I’d been. All I worried about was me, my true love, my life. The relationship with Julie turned to pus long before she left, but Colette and her brother were separated at the height of their closeness. How much worse that must be than my self-imposed melodrama. Colette needed me more than I needed her. The way was now clear. My calling in life was to save this beautiful woman from her calamitous marriage. I would hound her into loving me for her own good—not mine.

  ***

  Colette walked over and patted Dixie above the nose. “Sorry I went heavy on you there,” she said. “Whenever I think of Dirk I feel sad. I guess I don’t really understand death.”

  I loved Colette more than ever. “You shouldn’t apologize for feeling heavy. I eat up heavy. Anything less seems…” I couldn’t think of a word. “…less.”

  Colette hugged Dixie’s neck. It should have been me. “You want to go for a walk?” she asked. “Dixie will be okay, and I don’t feel like sitting.”

  “I just realized that we should get married.”

  “No.”

  Colette tested Dixie’s rei
ns, slapped her lightly on the shoulder, and walked off up the hill. I followed.

  “It’s for your own good,” I said. “With me, you’ll be happy when you’re an old woman. If you stay with Danny, you won’t be.”

  The hill behind the reservoir is kind of steep. I had some trouble with loose rocks and only caught up with Colette as she was climbing over a downed log. She said something I couldn’t understand.

  “What?” I asked. “What was that?”

  “How do you know all the answers? I never know anything for sure.”

  “I know you don’t love Danny.”

  Colette stopped, but she didn’t look back at me. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Say what?”

  “I didn’t say I don’t love Danny.”

  I reached for her arm. “Do you?”

  Colette turned around. “Keep it trivial, Kelly, nice and light, okay. I’m not the type for scenes.”

  Gently, I eased Colette toward me. She almost came into a hug, but then she jerked away.

  “This is crazy. I can’t talk to you like this. I just got married last month. I haven’t even written all the thank you notes yet.”

  “Thank-you notes for what?”

  “Presents, wedding presents. Come on, let’s walk.” She started back up the hill.

  “What kind of wedding presents?”

  “You know. The usual shit.”

  “No. I don’t know. I never got a wedding present.”

  Colette broke a twig off a blue spruce as we walked past it. “Silverware, towels, bonds, Dixie.”

  “What kind of bonds?”

  “I don’t know. John wants us to buy land and have babies.”

  “You mean bonds to pay for those kinds of things?”

  “Yes.”

  We were nearing the top of the hill. I could see blue sky behind the trees ahead. Taggart Creek said, “Gil Hodges batted .289 in 1958,” which I took to be a lie.

  “Which do you want first?”