Sex and Sunsets: A Novel

by Tim Sandlin

  “You should have gone with him.”

  “I know.” Colette looked back at the mountains. She pulled thick hair behind her ear. “Four years later Dirk died, and I’m still afraid.”

  I sat next to Colette, watching a raven soar in tight circles over the green band along the river. I wondered about Dirk who had been alive and important to Colette, but now was dead. I liked being alive. Life is interesting—sun, birds, love, food, television, sex—there’s always something to think about. There’s nothing to think about when you’re dead.

  Colette backhanded her pile of leaves, scattering green strips. “All right,” she said.

  “All right?”

  She turned back toward me. “You win. I’ll run away with you, but this new life you’re promising better be pretty god-damn wonderful.”

  ***

  I couldn’t believe it. The closest water was a quarter-mile away, though, so Colette must have said what I’d heard. I talked quickly, before she changed her mind. “We’ll have a fantastic life. I promise. It’ll be so wonderful. Rainbows for breakfast and orgasms for lunch. We’ll name our firstborn Bliss and the second Honeysuckle.”

  “None of those weird hippie names for my kids. How many are you planning to have, anyway?”

  Colette and I whiled away the afternoon in dreams and fantasies. How many children, and what sex? What kind of house? Who would make the coffee in the morning, and would our sandwiches be cut crosswise or diagonally? I promised I’d never trim my toenails in bed if she wouldn’t eat a banana in front of me. I hate bananas.

  We discussed preschool education, side-of-the-bed preferences, forms of birth control, favorites in cereal and country music—all things we should have talked about months earlier.

  I confessed my awful habit of dribbling on the bathroom floor. She told me she liked to be on top. It was the happiest afternoon of my life. My loved one and I lay in the sun, planning our future together. What could be more satisfying?

  I wanted to go that moment, hand in hand into the sunset, but Colette was too practical. “I can’t leave my toothbrush. Or my nightie, my diary, my checkbook, the gold earrings, my pillow. I’m not like you. I have to have clean underwear or I won’t get out of bed.”

  Colette didn’t care how in love we were, she had to pack first. We decided on an elopement, a midnight rendezvous at her car.

  “Lock Thor inside,” I said.

  “What if I chicken out?”

  “I’ll come in and get you.”

  Before Colette walked back to the ranch, I held her close and we kissed. The kiss was very nice, deep and meaningful.

  ***

  At the University of Arkansas, I became the sociology department expert on suicide. The subject has always fascinated me—why do it, how to do it, do failures fail on purpose. Not that I want any firsthand experience at death, but if the urge should someday overpower the restraint, I’d like to know what I’m getting myself into.

  Some facts: San Francisco, California, and Laramie, Wyoming, are the suicide capitals of America. Thursday is the most popular day to off oneself, and Christmas is actually a religious population-control device. The famous author Robert E. Howard wasted himself when his mother died. I find that interesting.

  The most fascinating aspect of suicide is the children. Each year, between five and six hundred children under the age of seven kill themselves on purpose. At least ten times that number give it a try. Imagine that—being six years old and feeling the necessary grief to end yourself.

  My idea is that the kid gets a glimpse of what the future is going to be like and decides it isn’t worth the bother. Sometimes, parents overstress the religious heaven-is-wonderful, everyone-there-is-happy line, and the kid buys it like Santa Claus. “Okay, if heaven’s so neat, I’m going there now instead of cleaning my room.”

  There’s also the sour-grapes-against-mama theory. “I’ll show that bitch,” the little girl cried as she ran onto the interstate.

  Whatever the reason, the decisiveness of preschool suicide is remarkable.

  My own attempts have been anything but decisive. Lizbeth says they were “half-assed.” The only one that ended in positive action and the hospital was the tequila-up-the-veins trick I pulled in the Cowboy Bar, and to this moment I maintain all I wanted was a buzz before bed.

  If only I hadn’t left the note.

  I always leave notes, though. There were two or three of them tucked in books around the apartment. Finger exercises just in case I pulled together enough nerve to do it—or in case I was ever run over by a truck.

  One of the older jokes among us creative types is the one about the writer who wanted to kill himself but couldn’t finish the fifth draft of the suicide note. I don’t want to get caught too depressed at the end to write an original, witty, yet touching good-bye letter to the world. So I practice.

  ***

  Julie came by to steal the Dutch oven. She had only been out of our apartment for a couple of months, and was just changing from the warm friendship of a former lover to the you’re-an-asshole-and-I-wasted-my-life-with-you attitude.

  She opened the door without knocking. “Hi,” Julie said. “I didn’t expect to find you home.”

  I lay on the couch, staring at a picture of a cat on a calendar on the wall. I hadn’t moved in several hours. “I’m glad to see you, Julie,” I said.

  “I bet. I came to get the Dutch oven. It’s shrimp creole night.” She walked past the couch and into the kitchen. The dishes hadn’t been washed in a month.

  “I thought the Dutch oven was mine.”

  “I’m just borrowing it. You can’t cook and I can. Why should it go to waste here?” Julie’s finest point was her cooking. I would still give a year of my life for a plate of her shrimp creole.

  Julie banged around the kitchen, digging through the dirty pots and pans. “This place is a pit,” she said. “Why don’t you pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake? No wonder you don’t have any friends, Kelly. All you do is lie around feeling sorry for yourself.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  She came out of the kitchen, carrying the Dutch oven and the lid. Standing next to the trunk, Julie looked down on me. “Don’t be so pitiful, Kelly. Thousands of people break up and you don’t see them whining around, behaving like babies.”

  “Who’s the creole for?” I asked.

  “None of your business.”

  “Okay.”

  Julie left. I sat up and wrote a twelve-page suicide letter, explaining how I had done everything I cared to do—loved, watched some sunsets, screwed to my heart’s content, seen Willie Nelson live—and there wasn’t any more reason to put up with all the bad for the little bit of good I might blunder into later.

  The letter rambled. I read it years afterward, and I’m glad I didn’t die because it was a sorry piece of writing to leave for a legacy.

  I decided to go to the Cowboy and drink myself to death, but I only had five dollars, and getting drunk—much less dying—on five dollars in the Cowboy went out with nickel Cokes.

  Deep in the middle cushion of my couch lay a barely used, 28-gauge, half-inch insulin syringe left there by a traveling diabetic junkie from Oklahoma. It stayed in the cushion, dormant yet capped, for two years. I was always scared to death a passing parent might find the syringe, but I never had the courage to throw it away.

  I dug the needle out of the couch, stuck it in my back pocket, walked to the Cowboy Bar, and ordered a shot of tequila, straight. I told the bartender not to bother with the lemon and salt.

  I carried my tequila to a stall in the bathroom and sat on the toilet with my pants up and the shot glass on the floor between my feet. The floor was filthy. Bending way over, I drew in a barrel full of tequila. Then I leaned back and held the needle straight up, tapping it with my fingers to clear the air bubbles.

 
Holding the needle in my left hand, I rolled my left shirtsleeve just above the elbow, then twisted the material around to form a tourniquet on my arm. I held the tourniquet in place with my teeth and felt for the vein with my fingertip. It swelled up, round and blue.

  The shot was easy. The needle popped into the vein, I drew back the plunger, and blood popped into the barrel. I released my shirt with my teeth and drove home the tequila.

  It felt like somebody hit me hard in the forehead. My stomach wrenched. I could taste the tequila in my salivary glands.

  Staggering some, I made it to the sink and cleaned out my needle. There was still plenty of tequila left in the shot glass, so I figured if I was going to die, I might as well do a good job of it.

  After that, I blacked out. Pam told me later that she poured me another shot of tequila that night, but I picked it up and walked away without paying. I guess they found me with the syringe hanging out of my arm and a good deal of blood on the stall floor. I don’t remember.

  I woke up with a much bigger syringe taped to my arm, a tube down my throat, and two sets of electrodes clamped to my chest. My wrists were tied to the sides of the bed. I didn’t know why all these things were attached to me. So far as I could remember, one moment I was lying on my couch, looking at a cat calendar, and the next moment I was in a hard bed with a tube down my throat.

  “Number two is awake,” someone said.

  A girl in a white uniform came up beside me and pulled the thing out of my throat. “You won’t need this anymore,” she said. A name tag above her breast said NAN. She had a voice like a cartoon mouse.

  Nan held my head up and gave me a sip of water. “You can’t have much,” she said.

  “My tongue,” I croaked.

  “You swallowed it last night,” Nan said. “It hurts to swallow your tongue, doesn’t it?”

  “Where am I?”

  “Intensive care.”

  “Where?”

  “The hospital.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Something had gone wrong.

  “Good morning,” a voice said next to me.

  Opening my eyes, I saw a short, slightly overweight woman, smiling at me. “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m Lizbeth Morley. I’m with the Jackson Hole Mental Health Association. I understand you had some trouble last night.”

  “What happened?”

  Lizbeth sketched in the details of how I was found. She held my farewell letter in her right hand. “Your landlord picked this up in your apartment,” she said. “That’s why they called me.”

  “I didn’t try to kill myself.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just wanted to get drunk and go to sleep.”

  “You almost got drunk and went to sleep forever.” I closed my eyes and groaned. “Why did you write this letter?” she asked.

  Purple splotches floated on the insides of my eyelids. “I was sad.”

  “What seemed to be the problem?”

  I thought about the problem. “Julie made shrimp Creole and didn’t invite me.”

  “That’s why you tried to kill yourself?”

  “That’s why I wrote the letter. I didn’t try to kill myself.”

  “This is a lot of trouble to go to because you didn’t get invited to dinner.”

  “You don’t know Julie’s shrimp creole.” I looked at Lizbeth. She seemed kind. “How much does this room cost?” I asked.

  “Two hundred forty dollars a day.”

  “I should have killed myself.”

  “Don’t think about the money now. Tell me more about Julie’s shrimp creole.”

  That’s how it began. I talked to Lizbeth at least once a week for two years. In fact, that first Wednesday on the mountain was the only appointment I ever missed. I knew Lizbeth would be mad about the missed appointment. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to run away with Colette right then. I was more afraid of Lizbeth catching me than John Hart.

  ***

  Why, poised on the brink of the greatest victory in my life, was I sitting next to my tent and typewriter, reliving old suicide attempts? Why can’t I ever relax and enjoy good fortune?

  The one thing I’ve learned since high school: If times are good, they’re bound to get worse; if times are bad, they’re bound to get better. This makes me optimistic when I’m down and pessimistic when I’m up—unhappy when I’m happy and happy when I’m not.

  Lizbeth says I’m not relaxed unless I’m tragic. Breaking down the tent, stuffing my sleeping bag in the backpack, hiding all traces of the campfire, I was in nervous ecstasy.

  Suddenly there was something, and when you get something, you get something to lose.

  But Colette was worth the trouble. I might hold her for a day or six years—I can’t comprehend longer than that. However long Colette stayed, having her would be worth losing her.

  And I might not ever lose her. The romance had already soared beyond my wildest dreams. Maybe Colette and I would own land, raise a family, find financial security, reach orgasms every single day until we died together on the dance floor seventy years from now. Lord knows, it was worth a try.

  ***

  All packed and ready to go, I pulled off my clothes and jumped in the creek for a bath. The water was repulsed. “Is that soap biodegradable?” It used the Kurt Gowdy voice.

  “Nope,” I said. “It’s Irish Spring.”

  “You’re polluting me.”

  “Sorry.”

  After that, the water refused to speak anymore. I climbed out of the creek and sat on the bank watching another in a series of beautiful Wyoming sunsets. This one had no clouds to reflect orange and purple, but it was nice anyway.

  The sun dipped behind Rendezvous Mountain, the temperature dropped, and I started to shiver. Not waiting for my body to dry out, I hurried back to camp and dressed wet. Those weeks of sitting in dirt and sleeping in sweat had taken their toll on my boxer shorts. I couldn’t bear to put them on my clean crotch, so I buried them respectfully and went without.

  Because it was dark, I hiked down the jeep trail to the main road, then backtracked along the road to the Broken Hart gate. Stashing my pack and the Royal portable behind the buck-and-rail fence, I settled in to wait for midnight.

  Of course, I had no watch and no idea how long it was to midnight. Up on the mountain, I’d pretty well transcended the theory of time. When the sun rose, I woke up. When I felt hungry, I ate. I tried to reach the rock before Danny and his dad left for work, but it meant nothing if I missed them. This midnight assignation was my first appointment since the Wednesday visit with Lizbeth over two weeks before.

  I hid in the dark a long time, wondering if it was midnight or not. Every now and then a car came along, shining its lights on the fence and my pack, but none stopped.

  Finally I got desperate. The next car that drove by, I walked onto the road and stuck out my thumb. It didn’t stop. Because of talking with Colette and packing and bathing, I hadn’t watched the ranch all afternoon or evening. I had no idea who was home or who might drive in. Wouldn’t John Hart be surprised to find me hitchhiking in front of his house?

  The next car didn’t stop either.

  Timing was important. If I wasn’t there at midnight, Colette might go back inside to bed. It would be just like her. So, the next lights I saw coming, I stood in the middle of the road, waving my arms.

  The car hesitated, sped up, then stopped right in front of me. It was a Grand Prix with California plates. A man and a woman sat in the front seat, looking rich and nervous.

  The man rolled down his window a full half-inch. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Some kind of an emergency?”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know the time?”

  “The what?”

  “The time. What time is it?”

  He
looked at his wife, who said, “It’s a trick, Lawrence.”

  “It’s no trick. It’s very important that I know what time it is.”

  The man looked at his wrist. “Eleven-fifteen.”

  I thought of something. “Is that California time or Wyoming time?”

  “Wyoming time.”

  Backing away from the car, I said, “Thanks a lot. You’ve been a big help.”

  The man looked at his wife. She shrugged. As they drove away, I stood in the road, watching their taillights.

  ***

  I sat next to my pack, cleaning my glasses with what was left of my shirt for what seemed like forty-five minutes. Then I walked through the gate under the broken heart and up the long drive.

  The moon was up, which made it nice. I could see the form of the big house off to my left, and beyond that the barn and bunkhouse. An owl flew by, silent as the owl that took my Snoofy.

  The cars were parked in a row across the drive from John Hart’s house. Colette’s Subaru sat second from the left, between the Toyota and Danny’s Powerwagon. I hoped she had remembered to gas it up. This elopement might turn into an anticlimax if we ran out of gas ten minutes down the road.

  Colette wasn’t there. Thinking maybe she’d gotten cold, I looked in the window of the Subaru, but no Colette.

  Both houses were dark. It wasn’t like Danny hadn’t gone to bed yet so she couldn’t leave. Maybe she was fooling around with him one last time, for nostalgia’s sake. Maybe she’d fallen asleep in front of Johnny Carson. Maybe she’d backed out.

  I wasn’t about to let Colette change her mind. She promised we would run away and be happy, and we were going to run away and be happy if I had to drag her out of the house by her hair.

  Feeling like a comic-book commando, I crouched next to the cars, watching the bunkhouse door. No sound, no movement, nothing. It was stupid.

  I waited a half hour before going in after her.

  The front door was unlocked. Quietly, I walked into the dark room. I mean, that place was dark. Right off, I banged my shin on a chair.

  “Colette,” I whispered. “Colette, where the hell are you?”