Sex and Sunsets: A Novel

by Tim Sandlin

From outside, I knew which bedroom was hers, but I didn’t know how to get there from inside. I had no idea how to find Colette without finding Danny.

  The problem didn’t last long. I took two more steps forward and the lights came on. Blinded for a moment, I shielded my eyes with both hands.

  “Colette?”

  “Get him!” John Hart shouted. John and a policeman blocked the door. On the other side, next to the stairs, stood Danny Hart and another policeman.

  I ran for the window and dived. The glass must have been made of space-age plastic because I bounced like a Ping-Pong ball off a cement floor.

  John Hart jumped on me, holding down my face with his knee. The cops each held a shoulder. Kicking and screaming, I managed to shake one arm free long enough to poke John in the side. It didn’t have much effect.

  “Bring Colette,” John ordered.

  “Dad.”

  “Danny, bring Colette.”

  I stopped writhing and tried to bite his knees. John slapped me on the ear.

  Colette stood above me, wearing a blue bathrobe. She looked pale and shaky. I could tell she had been crying.

  John removed his knee from my face.

  “Why didn’t you meet me?” I asked.

  “Oh, Kelly.” Colette stopped. She held her hands together in front of her chest. Danny stood behind her.

  John growled, “Tell him.”

  “Dad,” Danny said.

  “It’s time to get this over with forever. Tell him what you did, Colette.”

  Colette started to cry.

  “Not only did she decide not to meet you,” John continued, “but she told Danny you were coming.”

  Colette looked so unhappy. “Did you do that?” I asked. Colette nodded, tears flowing from her eyes.

  “She turned you in,” John shouted. “Do you understand? She betrayed you.”

  On the word betrayed, Colette’s chest heaved and she moaned. I tried to reach out for her, but they held my arms.

  I said, “Colette, I understand.”

  12

  They charged me with trespassing, breaking and entering, attempted kidnapping, assault (the poke at John), resisting arrest, and voyeurism (Colette told where I’d been for two weeks).

  Between 1969 and 1973, I figure I committed an average of seven felonies a day, but, strange as it sounds, I had never been in jail before. I’d come close twice.

  One Christmas Eve, I flew a trunkful of marijuana—forty-two pounds wrapped in garbage bags—from Tucson, Arizona, to Boise, Idaho. Some fool teenager waving a snub-nosed .38 hijacked the plane and ordered the pilot to fly to Cuba. How trite can you get? “Turn this plane around, capitalist pig, and take me to Havana.” This was at least three years after everyone else hijacked planes to Cuba. And the pilot was no capitalist, much less a pig. He belonged to a union. I was probably the only true capitalist on the airplane.

  I sat in the first row of first class, watching in amazement. The kid was a clown. He couldn’t have been over sixteen, had a big red zit on the back of his neck. He was so excited his voice squeaked like Alfalfa’s in the Our Gang TV reruns. The whole thing would have been pitiful if I didn’t have a truckload of pot in the baggage compartment.

  I could just picture the Cuban army or whoever handles these things opening my trunk. Each pound was wrapped in six plastic bags, with talcum powder and ammonia in every other bag to fool the dope-sniffing German shepherds in the Tucson airport. The Cubans would sing with glee and dance in the plaza. They’d make an example of me: DECADENT AMERICAN DOPE PUSHER CAPTURED AT AIRPORT. My picture would be in Newsweek, Mom and Dad would be disillusioned, and I’d spend the rest of my short life hacking sugarcane with a machete.

  If the Cubans didn’t open the trunk, American customs would for sure find the marijuana on the way back into the States. Any way the deal came down, I wouldn’t be in Idaho for Christmas.

  Luckily for me and unluckily for the poor hijacker, when we stopped in Houston to refuel, an FBI sharpshooter blew the kid’s brains all over my brand-new Levi Saddleman Boot-Cut jeans. I had some trouble explaining the blood to Mom.

  ***

  Years after my outlaw period, after Julie left and I no longer broke any laws that I knew about—I was actually arrested for anal entry. It was her idea. She said she liked it that way. Hell, if a woman says she likes something I generally do it. The purpose of sex is to please someone else while she pleases you. Isn’t it?

  What happened was this Evanston, Wyoming, oil baron discovered a tube of Preparation H in his daughter’s underwear drawer. She could have claimed Act of God or lack of roughage or plain ignorance, but no, she had to tell the truth and point me out as the cause.

  Personally, I’d like to know why the oil baron was playing around in his daughter’s underwear drawer in the first place. Perhaps kinkiness is hereditary. His daughter sure was an odd one.

  Anyway, two hours later I’m handcuffed in the backseat of a police car that stinks—they must never clean up after drunks in Evanston—and this pudgy, red-faced, righteous father is screaming at a cop to shoot me and throw my body in the river.

  I didn’t even know anal entry was illegal in Wyoming. I’ve always done pretty much anything a woman told me to do. It never occurred to me that I might be breaking a law—although to be fair here, I doubt if legality would have been a factor at the time.

  “Please, Kelly, give it to me my way.”

  “I can’t, dear, it’s against the law.”

  The cop refused to shoot me until we talked to his cousin who was a judge, so the three of us drove over to the judge’s ranch house on the north end of town. The judge listened to the facts, nodded a couple of times, then pointed out to the oil baron that my crime was unprovable unless his daughter testified in court, in front of a jury, that she had been butt-fucked by a transient derelict.

  I was given an escort to the Uinta County line and told never to return.

  ***

  The oil baron’s daughter wasn’t the only strange woman I met after Julie left. I was twenty-seven years old then and I had never been on a date, flirted, courted, or pursued a woman. I had never played the field. I didn’t even know there was a field. Puberty and Julie had come into my life simultaneously—like white men and hookers to a third-world paradise.

  With some fury, I set about making up for lost time. I wanted to fuck every woman I came in contact with. I set quotas and kept score. My first goal was to ball my way, in order, around the zodiac. I never made it—got stuck on Sagittarius—though God only knows I tried.

  Andy was the first. I chased her a couple of weeks before tricking her into the sack one night. The next day she quit her job and moved to New Mexico. I figure I was either very good or very bad. Whatever, Andy saw something in me that scared her clean out of the state.

  Then came Ginnie, the runaway, the most enthusiastic lover in the Rocky Mountain West. She wanted me to meet her parents. One morning I woke up and Ginnie and two hundred dollars were gone.

  There was an older woman, forty or so. Her brother caught us in bed and beat me up.

  Another girl, I swear I thought she was twenty, stayed a weekend. On Monday she asked if I would give her a lift to school.

  “School?”

  “Yeah, Jackson Hole Junior High.”

  I met and seduced the visually most beautiful woman on earth—Lacy Rasher from Mobile, Alabama. Lacy was a botanist for the Park. She’s the one who taught me the Latin names for all the flowers I like.

  The day Lacy moved in, she contracted an unbelievable case of diarrhea. She took it a week, then said, “Kelly, I love you, but I’ll die if I stay another night.” She left and the diarrhea cleared up.

  The strangest one, Missy Black, was a waitress who must have hung around microwave ovens too much, because her IUD picked up a country-western station from Fort
Worth, Texas. The first time I slithered on down there the Oak Ridge Boys’ version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” came piping out the slit. I accused Missy of unnatural acts with a transistor radio and she flew off the handle. We ended up with nobody getting off and her leaving in a bad mood.

  I talked to a doctor about it later and he said this sort of thing had happened before. Honest.

  Would I make that up?

  Every single one of them bruised or broke my poor heart. When they left, I’d go tragic as hell for a day, then rush off to find a replacement. I loved anyone who liked me. Or acted like she liked me.

  For two years, I drank a lot, danced a lot, threw out hundreds of lines and caught a few lightweights, but the whole ordeal was a bother. I should have stayed home, reading and waiting for Colette to drop into my life.

  ***

  I used to hate being a skinny, assless wimp. In high school it mattered. For any kid under, say, twenty-five, a bad body is a detriment to simple seduction, but once over twenty-five, the pinhead is in.

  You look at the major sex symbols of the seventies. Not those flash-in-the-pan lust objects that lasted a year or two and faded to the stud farm, but the men looked at with more open mouths and wet cervixes than all others.

  The way I figure, the three men who could have gotten laid most often by the most women the decade of the seventies were Willie Nelson, Woody Allen, and Mick Jagger.

  Average height—five feet six inches. Average weight—137.

  So there.

  ***

  Jail, in Jackson Hole, in the summertime, is cruel and unusual punishment and should be unconstitutional. I sat on my bunk, staring out the window at the fresh air and sunshine and the mountains in the distance. I hadn’t slept indoors in weeks and now I was confined in a green room, five paces by eight paces, with a line of bars a foot or so in front of the windows, four monastery-hard bunk beds, two toilet-sink combinations, a shower, a portable black-and-white TV, and a huge pile of ancient magazines.

  They stuck me in orange coveralls and cotton slippers. Orange coveralls. Jesus.

  Cell One goes to juveniles and women. Cell Two is for dangerous criminals, murderers, rapists, bad people. Cell Three is the drunk tank, and Cell Four holds up to sixteen of the endless chain of small-timers who come through Jackson. They steal towels from a motel, or drink a beer on the street, or take an unpaid-for shower in a private campground, and end up in Cell Four.

  I was thrown into Cell Two with a murderer and an environmentalist.

  The murderer was okay. His name was Luke and he smoked Larks all day and watched soap operas on the TV. Luke didn’t mind jail at all because he knew he would be out soon. The odds of a man being convicted for murder in Wyoming are about fifty to one. Some counties have never had a single conviction.

  But the environmentalist was in big trouble. All coarse black hair and muscles, Jimmy looked like a gentle bear. Jimmy had shot down a seismograph helicopter. He’d done it nicely, so no one got hurt. He thought he was saving the wilderness, but instead he gave himself ten years of living indoors.

  The only thing I didn’t like about Jimmy was that he paced up and down all day, hogging the floor space for himself.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but they arrested me on a Friday night—June 25, to be exact. I slept most of Saturday and Sunday. After three weeks of insanity on the mountain, it was almost a relief to be around people again, piss in a flush toilet, hear feminine hygiene commercials on the portable TV. Wouldn’t have been that awful if I hadn’t been in jail.

  ***

  On Monday a court-appointed lawyer came to see me. He had pink cheeks, very long earlobes, and a brown three-piece suit.

  “The judge is making me handle this case,” he said miserably. “John Hart owns the house we’re renting, and my wife is pregnant. I don’t know what we’ll do if I win.”

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  The lawyer looked very unhappy. “You don’t understand. I just passed the bar exams in May and this is my first case. In law school I swore never to compromise my values or do less than my best for a client.” He looked away and exhaled deeply. “How will I face my new baby if I sell myself out on the first case? What do I say to my wife?”

  “You’re idealistic?”

  He nodded. “It was easy being idealistic in college. I didn’t expect a test so soon.”

  He told me his name was Robin. His wife’s name was Sybil and they were from Colorado Springs. If the baby was a boy they would name him Ralph, after Ralph Nader.

  “All through law school we dreamed of living in Jackson Hole and raising a family.”

  “That’s my dream also,” I said.

  Robin looked back at me and kind of smiled—like a sick person assuring a loved one that he doesn’t really feel bad.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “That’s all I deserve.”

  “We can beat most of the charges by putting Colette on the stand and hoping she admits you were invited into the house. Where they’ve got you against the wall is that mental incompetency complaint your wife signed. John Hart’s lawyers worked it up. Must have cost him ten thousand dollars.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  He nodded. “Looks convincing to me.”

  “You think I’m insane and dangerous?”

  His eyes traveled down my orange coveralls, then back up. “I don’t see how you could be that dangerous.”

  “Thanks.”

  Robin may have been idealistic, but he dressed like one of Danny’s fraternity brothers. Maybe all the idealistic people wear three-piece suits and wide ties these days.

  “How much is bail?” I asked.

  “Eighty-five thousand dollars, but they won’t let you pay it until after the sanity hearing Friday.”

  “Eighty-five thousand. I can’t be that dangerous.”

  “At the sanity hearing, the judge will probably send you to the State Mental Institution in Evanston for thirty days’ observation. If the shrinks say you’re psychiatrically fit, they’ll haul you back here, lower the bail to around fifty thousand, and try you on the kidnapping charge. It’s all pretty much routine.”

  “Where am I going to come up with fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Robin said. “With Hart’s team of lawyers against you, you don’t stand a chance in hell of coming back from Evanston.”

  “But I’m sane.”

  “Convince your wife and the judge of that.”

  I didn’t know about the judge, but Julie wasn’t about to admit to my sanity. “Maybe I can help with your problem,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You won’t win even if you try, so I come out the same either way. I’ll release and absolve you of any responsibility for my fate if you’ll do me one favor.”

  “I’m not certain a client can absolve a lawyer of his responsibilities.”

  “If you make my wife admit she is my wife, I won’t ask you to go up against John Hart.”

  Robin stared at me and nodded a couple of times. “Is it ethical to sell a client down the river even if he gives his blessing?”

  “How should I know, you’re the lawyer. I’m the guy in jail.”

  Robin stood up and smiled. “Right.”

  ***

  When I talked to the lawyer we both sat on stools and faced each other through a double-paned window, but later in the day, when Lizbeth came, they put us in a room about the size of a two-hole outhouse.

  It was real nice to see Lizbeth again, but I was kind of nervous. Landing in jail is not a sign of psychological progress.

  She sat in one of the two chairs. I stood, leaning against the wall.

  “How are you, Kelly?” Lizbeth asked.

  “Fine.”

  “They t
reating you well?”

  “Good as can be expected.”

  Except for the time in the hospital, I always saw Lizbeth in her office with the comfortable chairs and the pile carpet. She seemed smaller in jail.

  Lizbeth crossed her legs at the ankles, right over left. “What happened, Kelly?”

  I coughed. “Colette said she’d run away with me, then she changed her mind.”

  “Why did she change her mind?”

  “Hell if I know.” I coughed again. I didn’t know what to say. I felt embarrassed, standing in front of Lizbeth in cotton slippers and orange coveralls.

  “Are you suicidal?”

  I thought. “No. I haven’t wanted to kill myself since I met Colette. How about that?”

  “How about it?”

  “Guess I have a reason to live.”

  “Do you still want Colette, in spite of what she did?”

  “You don’t stop loving someone because she lets you down. I’ll always want Colette.”

  Lizbeth stared at me and I stared at the floor. She waited. I waited. The little room grew hot.

  “So what’s going to happen at this sanity hearing Friday?” I asked.

  “Julie will bring forth evidence to show you are mentally incompetent and dangerous to yourself or others. Your lawyer will show evidence that you aren’t. The judge can commit you permanently, throw the whole thing out, or send you to Evanston for thirty days’ observation. The third is most likely.”

  I looked at Lizbeth. It seemed like a long time since I’d talked to her the day I walked up on the mountain. I felt like a different person, but she looked the same.

  “Which side will you be on?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Will you testify for Julie or me?”

  “I’ll tell the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  Lizbeth made eye contact. “That you suffer from depressive neurosis and that you’re a passive dependent, which accounts for the obsession with Colette, but you are no danger to yourself or anyone else.”

  “Thanks. I guess.”

  “It’s my job.”

  I pulled the other chair over and straddled it backward with my arms across the back. “I tried to kill John Hart once. If Colette hadn’t promised to run away with me, I thought I might kidnap her. Doesn’t that make me dangerous?”