Sex and Sunsets: A Novel

by Tim Sandlin

  “She’s ashamed of these things?”

  I thought. “It doesn’t fit her new image. Also, now that she’s been away awhile, Julie sees me for the true spook I really am, and it infuriates her to know people point at me and say, ‘That skinny little nerd used to fuck Julie Deere.’”

  Lizbeth watched me a moment. “Does Julie think you’re a spook and a nerd?”

  I scratched my upper left arm. “Rick hates me for it. He can’t stand everyone knowing I used to lay on top of Julie and stick my dick in her.”

  “Can you blame him?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared at Lizbeth’s toes in the stockings. They looked unnaturally short and stubby—funny toes. “It kind of hurts that Mom is going along with this mental institution idea.”

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t seem the motherly thing to do.”

  Lizbeth tucked both her feet under the chair. I think she was self-conscious about her short toes. “What do you think your mother is thinking?”

  “God, I don’t know. I’ve never been able to understand her thought process. I suppose Julie told her about the hang glider accident. Mom always believes other people’s versions of what happened over mine.”

  “Did you tell her your version of the hang glider accident?”

  “She wouldn’t understand.”

  “Do you ever tell her your version of anything?”

  “When I was little and had fights with neighbor kids, I tried to tell her my side, but she took for granted I was lying.”

  “You haven’t told your mother your side since you were a little boy?”

  I thought about Lizbeth’s question and decided to change the subject. “Can they do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Lock me away.”

  “It’s very doubtful unless I testify that you’re dangerous to yourself or society, and you know I won’t do that because you aren’t.”

  “Thanks.” I thought of something. “Has Mom or Julie contacted you yet?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Kelly. It’s unethical,” Lizbeth said, nodding yes.

  “John Hart’s out to get me. He could threaten to cut off the clinic’s state funds if you don’t declare me insane.”

  Lizbeth’s face was serious. “I promise you that won’t happen, Kelly.”

  I trust Lizbeth. When she promises, I believe.

  Lizbeth continued, “He asked to see your files.”

  “Asked?”

  “Demanded.”

  “What happened?”

  “We refused.”

  “Thanks again.”

  Lizbeth pulled her feet out from under the chair. “He won’t get to you through the clinic.”

  I stared at those stubby little toes under the dark hose. “John Hart and Julie would like each other.”

  ***

  Mom and Julie didn’t like each other. They didn’t get along right from the beginning. Not that they openly and actively hated one another. They were much too subtle for that. They acted more like two top gunfighters drinking in the same bar. They respected each other’s skills too much to open fire, but each always knew just where the other stood, and they overreacted to any suspicious moves.

  After the first summer in Jackson, Julie and I rented a trailer outside of Lancaster, Idaho, ten miles from my parents’ house. Lancaster is county seat of Teewinot County, a small, isolated valley between Jackson Hole and Idaho Falls. The women still wear beehive hairdos. The men chew in church.

  Mama was born a Hawken, which meant she had over two hundred relatives living within rifle range. I guess all those backward in-laws made Julie nervous. Whatever the reason, bits and pieces and, later, whole chunks of the marriage collapsed during the year and a half we hibernated in east Idaho.

  It didn’t collapse from any lack of togetherness. For an unexaggerated fact, the first six months we lived in the trailer, Julie was never out of my sight for over forty-five seconds. There wasn’t even a door to the bathroom or a curtain for the shower. Neither one of us worked. Neither one of us did anything outside the trailer that I can recall.

  Julie was in command. Our lives were as organized and compartmentalized as the staff at a brand-new McDonald’s. She made the coffee, watered the plants, dug the garden. I dealt with the outside: landlords, mechanics, Mother. Every morning Julie cooked breakfast, I ate it while reading a book, then I sat at my desk and wrote until lunch.

  She fed me again at lunch and together we watched an Andy Griffith rerun. In the afternoon I shoveled snow or Mom came over or something happened to pass the time. Later we’d drink a bottle of sherry, watch the weather on TV, fuck, and go to sleep. Whole days passed without more than twenty words being spoken out loud.

  I wrote three of my four novels in Idaho. They were sagas of the Old West: broken gunfighters, drunk sheriffs, women hard as quartz with hearts of ice cream.

  The books obsessed me. While working on a novel, I lived, talked, and ate with the characters, I had wet dreams about the women I created. I lived in a world Julie couldn’t enter and I guess she resented being locked out.

  One time she threw an entire first novel out in the snow and screamed, “Talk to me, you shit. I can’t stand playing second fiddle to a lousy novel anymore.” I managed to save most of the book by drying the pages on the oil heater.

  Once every month or so we drove forty miles to Jackson and saw a movie and drank in the Cowboy. I remember lots of cold, drunken drives home over Teton Pass through blowing blizzards. The second winter, I worked a few nights a week at Blackie and Carol’s, drawing beers and cleaning ashtrays while an old lumpy cowboy named Dusty Pockets sang heartbreaking country songs for spare-change donations. A few couples danced in a cleared spot by the cash register. Other people played table shuffleboard or penny poker. It was fun. Julie always came along and sat at the bar. She never talked to anyone and no one talked to her. I encouraged her to sit next to Dusty and sing along like she used to with Babe Stovall, but I guess to Julie Idaho was different from New Orleans.

  Julie never forgave me for making her live so close to Mom, and of course Mom told me over and over that it wouldn’t work, that Julie would leave me soon. She said Julie couldn’t keep a house clean and would bear me autistic children.

  Mom bought me a hypoallergenic pillow for Christmas. Julie threw it out the back door. Mom made me a meat loaf. Julie fed it to Alice. They both tucked my shirttail in for me in public. I was an off-color pawn in a battle between the black and white queens. They treated me like a retarded boy at the center of a child-custody suit—each wanting control of me in spite of the fact that they considered me a helpless idiot.

  I did hear them agree on something once. It was in the Bicentennial summer of 1976. I was helping Dad build a bookshelf in the bathroom. Mom loves bookshelves in bathrooms. She fills them with Reader’s Digests in case constipation ever hits and there’s nothing around to read. I popped my thumb with a hammer and went off to find Julie to have her fix it. They sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee and deciding what kind of shoes I should wear that summer. I stood at the door, listening.

  Mom said, “Lord only knows what Kelly would do without us to look out for him.”

  And Julie answered, “He’d fall apart and die within two weeks. Kelly couldn’t eat if I didn’t feed him.” I decided to bandage my own thumb.

  Julie was right, of course. She was always right. I didn’t die of starvation two weeks after she left, but I came reasonably close. Two and a half years later, I still got by on the things Julie did for me. I wore the same clothes Julie had picked out. The same pictures hung in the same spots where she had put them. Except for a gradual deterioration and wearing thin, the apartment was exactly like it had been the day she walked away—down to a half-full box of tampons on the side of the bathtub. I wanted Julie to feel at home should she ever come ba
ck.

  ***

  I’m almost certain Julie was never unfaithful while we lived together. She was never out of my sight long enough to screw anyone else. Also, right before Julie left, at a time when she had no reason or desire to spare my feelings any pain, she said, “To think I spent six years being faithful to you, never even talking to another man. What a waste of time.”

  I did cheat on her once.

  It was at the county fair rodeo in Montpelier. I drove over with Rex Lyle and Bobby John Jefferson one Saturday night in mid-August. I’m not sure why Julie didn’t go. She hated rodeos, but that didn’t stop her from going most places. Julie hated a lot of things she did for entertainment.

  Bobby John liked beer, so we bought a couple of cases and I drank my share. I don’t normally drink beer. It makes me pee too often. During the bareback riding, I got the urge for about the third time in an hour, excused myself, and went down under the stand where I met a barrel racer from Tetonia named Shirley.

  I stood against a low fence, cupping it between my hands and listening to the stream, when she walked up—five foot three, dark pigtails, white hat, gum.

  “Hi,” she said. “My name is Shirley. I’m a barrel racer from Tetonia.”

  I shook twice and tucked myself back in. “I’m Kelly, a novelist from Lancaster.”

  She nodded. “That’s a nice dick you’ve got there.”

  “Thank you.” I had heard about Tetonia girls and barrel racers; both are supposed to be good fun, and I suppose my loyalty to Julie had always been based more on lack of opportunity than any sense of duty. Anyway, as soon as the girl started talking dirty, I perked right up.

  “I’m riding in a few minutes,” she said. “If I win I’m going to get my brother’s teeth fixed.”

  “Oh.”

  “A horse stepped on his face.”

  I had too much beer in me to be clever. “His face, huh?”

  “The horse didn’t do it on purpose. Leopold shouldn’t have been lying there.”

  “Leopold is your brother?”

  Shirley leaned forward and scratched behind my ears and down along my neck. “Yeah, I’ve just got to win for Leopold.”

  I didn’t move. “I hope you win, Shirley.”

  She scratched and patted and stuck her finger in my ear. “I ride a lot better when I’m relaxed.”

  What an opening. “How can I relax you?”

  Shirley smiled. “Want to go for a ride in my horse trailer? It’s got a mattress.”

  I almost came in my pants. It was so easy. Julie had me convinced that no woman would ever want me besides her. I mean, she was the first unless you count that tabletop revenge fuck with Carol. In fact, Julie was the only woman I’d ever come in. I’d always wondered what it would be like with someone else—someone shaped a little different. Was I any good? Did other women scream and moan like the women in the movies? What would other asses feel like in my hands?

  I didn’t even think about the fact that Shirley must do this fairly often if she took a mattress to the rodeo. I didn’t worry that she probably had crabs or clap or she might call me in four to six weeks to say she’d skipped her period.

  All I thought was, Damn, I’m going to get laid by someone other than Julie. Anyone, it didn’t matter who. It was time I got my piece of the forbidden kingdom.

  Shirley led me across the parking lot to a blue-and-gold single-stall horse trailer. On the back of the trailer was a sign that read MADE IN CHICKASHA, OKLAHOMA, and a bumper sticker that read COWGIRLS HAVE MORE FUN. She let down the ramp and led me into the stall. Evidently, it was an old mattress and the horse rode standing on it, but anything felt smoother than a haystack or a manure-filled pasture, which were the places I’d always heard loose cowgirls prefer.

  I still can’t figure out how she got her jeans off without removing her boots. All I know is I turned away to take off my pants—I never pull down anything facing a woman. I hopped first on one foot, then on the other, yanking off my sneakers. Then I shrugged off my shirt, and when my jeans were finally kicked into the corner, I turned around to find Shirley lying on her back, one knee raised seductively, wearing nothing but pointy-toed boots and a white cowboy hat.

  That was my first indication she might be kinky. The second came when I climbed on board and tried to kiss her. She would have none of it. Shirley raised her legs, stuck me in, and took off.

  I mean, I like passion, but I was accustomed to slow starts, gradual builds through the use of tongues and fingers and other implements of foreplay. With Julie, I pushed the right buttons and kissed the right spots and after thirty or forty minutes her breathing got real intense, she moaned, and came in a stifled shriek.

  Shirley came out of the chute shrieking. She grabbed my ears and humped like we’d been going at it for hours. I held on. After a few seconds she pulled my right ear down, hard. Then she kicked with the heels of her boots. Thank God she wasn’t wearing spurs. Another few seconds and she pulled the other way, on my left ear. Then more writhing and kicking.

  I didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t anything like Julie. Nothing in porno literature had prepared me for a barrel racer.

  Shirley jerked hard on the left ear again, then she humped like crazy, double the intensity of anything before. She made a noise, a high whine with gasps and things like “Go, baby. Move.”

  I don’t know where she got the stick. Her right hand moved off my back for an instant and the next thing I knew she was whipping me across the lower ass with a stick—a riding-crop-type thing. I stopped moving and she hit me real hard and yelled, “Go!”

  I went. Shirley hit me a couple more times. She raised both legs and arms straight up above my head and screamed.

  I stopped again. She pushed me out and off her. I lay against the trailer wall, watching her little breasts heave up and down. Sweat trickled across her neck and into her armpit.

  “Are you going to hit me anymore?” I asked.

  Shirley exhaled everything at once. “Eighteen seconds flat.”

  “Is it over? I didn’t come yet.”

  She sat up. “Eighteen seconds, I can feel a winner tonight.” Shirley leaned over and kissed me friendly-like on the cheek. “You just fucked a champ,” she said.

  She gathered up her clothes, slid her jeans on over the boots, buttoned up her shirt, and left. I lay on the mattress in the horse trailer for a long time, thinking.

  ***

  Julie found out, of course. I lay on my stomach in the middle of our bed while she rubbed Johnson’s Baby Lotion on the welts across my ass. Her hands were very gentle. Not once did Julie say “Serves you right,” or “That’ll teach you for screwing around,” or “Why, Kelly?” or anything.

  When we made love later that night, Julie was very careful not to touch any of the sore spots.

  ***

  In Idaho, Julie and I gave up the last remnants of our hippie lives. The painted microbus was gone. I cut my hair. Julie threw out the books on I Ching and Sensual Massage. The waterbed had been abandoned in New Orleans along with the pink rolling papers and a three-hose water pipe. Everything tie-dye, Day-Glo, or red, white, and blue went to the dump. Julie shaved her legs. I watched Cubs baseball on the cable TV.

  We even stopped smoking pot. By then, marijuana wasn’t a freak habit anyway. Everyone smoked—cowboys, rednecks, old retired couples, politicians—the only groups who didn’t smoke pot were ex-hippies and Mormon missionaries. It wasn’t a conscious today-we-stop-getting-high decision. Somehow, without consulting each other, Julie and I realized it wasn’t fun anymore. In fact, being drugged didn’t feel good at all. It felt rotten.

  We discovered the joy of being alert. I had never been alert before—at least as far back as I could remember. Also, after eight years or whatever of committing several felonies a day, it felt nice not to be scared. We no longer panicked at a knock on the doo
r.

  Nowadays, I’m a pot hater. As far as I know, so is Julie. I won’t allow the stuff in my house. If I see kids smoking in the park, I go over and testify to what a horrible habit marijuana is, offering myself as an example of how it can ruin a man.

  I quit all other drugs—pills and powders—even before Idaho.

  It was on account of a pop festival in a frying pan-hot baseball stadium outside of Dallas. The temperature in the stands must have been 110 degrees. Even Julie sweat. In the bathroom I met an emaciated, scraggly-haired kid. He couldn’t have been over fourteen. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and he looked skinnier than me.

  He held out a huge clear capsule filled with red beads and said, “Ten dollars.”

  I picked it up. “What is it?”

  “All the belladonna from four packs of Contac time capsules. Took me six hours to separate the decongestant from the antihistamines.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “Makes you hallucinate. You’ll think you can fly and talk to the dead.”

  I turned the pill over and held it between my thumb and forefinger. “Makes you think you can fly, huh? I’ll give you two dollars for it.”

  “Two dollars don’t even cover the costs of the Contac.” The kid’s skin color was pale, kind of translucent, the color of a television screen when it’s turned off, or the cadaver of a hepatitis victim. People that color need money.

  “Two dollars,” I said.

  “Shit,” he mumbled. “Okay.” He wadded up the two dollars and crammed it into his right front pocket. Then he blew his nose on a paper towel.

  Whatever was in that pill was strong. I remember holding my head under the cold tap to wash it down. As I was leaving the bathroom, a woman dragged in a screaming kid. She held his arm and pulled. He dug in both heels and yelled, “But I don’t have to go! I don’t have to go!”

  She shouted, “You’ll damn well go when I tell you!”

  Then a very fat midget walked up and said, “God sent me to tell you everything is all right. He planned this.”