Social Blunders

by Tim Sandlin

  “Let’s shoot her for bear bait,” I said. Auburn’s face turned scared. He can’t tell when I’m kidding yet, so he tends to take me literally, which sure as hell isn’t how I care to be taken.

  “Maybe I could read the others Winning Through Intimidation,” I said. I looked at Roger and winked, but his expression didn’t change. The boy’s expression never changed. Always the impassive observer. We weren’t sure how old Roger was, but he looked younger than Auburn, who was soon to turn twelve. Roger had the eyes of a person considerably older and more world-weary than any of us, and that’s saying a lot.

  I slid the X-Acto knife under the bale twine and cut up, toward my face. The loose string went into a potato sack at my feet, then, as forty or so horses led by the selfish nag Gristle shuffled in our path, I shoved layers of lime-green-and-yellow grass onto the tracked-over snow. Way off to the south, the sun shone weakly through a smattering of high clouds. Up by the ranch buildings, aspens stood against the hill like gangly white skeletons with oozing joints, while in creases along the foothills spruce and lodgepole pine made a kelly green mosaic on the snow, and way off alone an occasional limber pine declared its independence from everyone—animal or plant.

  The propriety of the whole scene kind of got to me, like I was an important piece of a huge jigsaw puzzle or a character in an Amish movie. Working outdoors in weather will do that sometimes—give you the feeling of being minutely small yet still consequential.

  I looked at the fenceline and saw 1966. Wyoming women. Broad shoulders, flat bellies, unafraid to look men in the eye. My Dodgers won the pennant, lost the World Series. That summer I’d gotten downwind of a grass fire in Curtis Canyon and the smoke stayed in my nose for weeks, so wherever I went I swore the immediate vicinity was smoldering. I slept with a shovel under the bed. I asked a girl named Tracy Goodman on a date and she said “Okay,” but when I went to pick her up she’d gone shopping in Idaho Falls. I often dreamed of winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and when I stood at the podium to give my speech I would start out, “Eat shit, Tracy Goodman.”

  Auburn’s voice cut through my vision. “Earth to Sam. Earth to Sam.”

  Maurey taught him to say that and he thinks it’s hilarious. He turned to rap Hank on the shoulder. “Sam’s left his body again.”

  Hank glanced back at me. “Tell Sam to close his mouth so his spirit can’t escape while he’s gone.”

  “Close your mouth so your spirit can’t escape—”

  “I heard him, Auburn.”

  Maurey doesn’t mind, but Lydia throws a fit when Hank talks about turning into a bird and flying around the universe in front of Auburn. She’s afraid Auburn will take him seriously, which Hank says is the point.

  “I was daydreaming,” I said.

  Hank gave his Blackfeet chuckle. “Bad practice to daydream with a knife in your hand. It may bite you.”

  Auburn laughed and I pretended to. What I actually did was block thoughts of Lydia by studying a lone raven flying toward the red hills across the river.

  Hank said, “Pud’s coming.”

  Pud’s white van with the Talbot Satellite Dish Systems Repair magnetic sign on the passenger door picked its way through the ruts and slush. We’re always the last county road plowed, so the ice base forms thickest, and when a rare December warm spell comes along it’s like driving through Dairy Queen soft ice cream. Takes four-wheel drive and the faith to keep moving no matter what. Those who stop may not start again.

  Hank angled the team—Luci and Desi—toward a semi-solid meeting place along the fence, where Pud wrestled the wheel until the van came to rest against the far snowbank. He opened the door and sat with his legs out of the van, waiting for us to skid up to the fence, then he hefted himself to the ground and crossed over the ruts.

  Pud Talbot wears cowboy boots year-round and a yellow cap that reads Dash Roustabout Service. He’s no taller than me and has the famous chin that marks all the Talbots except Auburn. Pud’s brother Dothan is Auburn’s father, and I’m afraid I’ve allowed the deep animosity—read that as hatred—that runs between Dothan and me to color my feelings for Pud. Also Pud sleeps with Maurey, and whether Maurey and I have a brother-sister deal or first-lover nostalgia or we’re simply best friends for life, my chosen role is to quietly resent anyone who sticks himself into her body.

  Luci and Desi shuffled to the fence and stopped, and us five males waited there a moment in the winter silence, which is so much more silent than summer silence there ought to be a different word for it.

  Pud put one boot up on the snowbank and said, “Pete died.”

  I looked away from Pud to the horses with their necks down, eating hay.

  Hank said, “The doctors told us he had another month.”

  “The doctors missed the call,” Pud said.

  More silence. A white mare raised her head and stared directly at me. I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “How’re Maurey and Chet taking it?” Hank asked.

  “About how you’d expect. They’ll be along in a couple hours.”

  For some reason, I turned to look at Roger. His eyes were huge and terrified, like a panicked deer. His mouth opened and he screamed.

  ***

  The secret to cornbread is in the oil. I would have used lard if I thought I could get away with it, but like everybody else in the drugs-and-alcohol generation, Maurey’s gone health crazy. As it was, I spooned a couple glops of Crisco into the ten-inch Dutch oven and stuck the Dutch oven in the real oven set at 350 degrees. Oil started, I pried the lid off the ceramic crock of sourdough starter that according to legend was brought across the Missouri River in 1881 by Maurey’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. I’d be willing to bet the crock hadn’t been washed since 1881. A thumb’s-width of dry dough skin ringed the lip of the crock like the rubber seal on a gasket.

  I measured two dippers of starter into a 1950s Art Deco bowl and broke in four eggs, double what the recipe called for. Then I went to the refrigerator for buttermilk, where I mused for about the eightieth time that no one drinks straight buttermilk these days and it seems more than a change of style but a degradation of American values. Wasn’t that long ago you knew you could trust a man who drank buttermilk.

  Toinette’s viola music filtered comfortably in from the next room. At the kitchen table, Roger and Auburn played a silent game of Risk. Roger’s scream hadn’t been one of those painful breakthroughs where the victim flashes onto what was repressed and starts talking again. From outward appearances, he didn’t seem affected by his foray into the world of sound. He knelt in the chair on his knees, leaning forward toward the game board, concentrating on pushing blue armies back and forth across the continents.

  Auburn also adopted the quiet method of warfare. Roger’s coming to the ranch had been nothing but good for Auburn. He stopped whining at chores and his picky eating habits disappeared practically overnight. Childishness no longer washes when you’re paired off with a true survivor.

  Maurey’s friend Mary Beth dropped Roger off at the TM a few days before my own arrival. Mary Beth said two men showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, and when they left the boy stayed, and she didn’t know what to do with him, so she brought him to Maurey. His father—who a long time ago was Mary Beth’s boyfriend—had been killed in Nicaragua running drugs or guns or something else horrible. Mary Beth mentioned slavery. She didn’t know how long Roger had been quiet. They thought he might be the half brother of Maurey’s artist friend who lives in Paris, but even that wasn’t certain. Maurey and Pud checked Roger over for scars and lice and no one had physically left marks on the boy, but one look in his soft brown eyes and it was clear he’d been through something that children shouldn’t go through.

  I lowered the heat on the huge pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. Mealtimes the next few days were bound to be off kilter, so it see
med a good idea to have something continuously ready. Freud could go to town on why I chose chicken soup, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t care what my motives were. I pulled the Dutch oven from the oven and carefully poured oil into the starter mix. This was the point where twice before I burned the bejesus out of myself. The rest was basically unskilled labor—mix in the whole wheat flour, cornmeal, salt, baking powder, baking soda. I had a box of sugar hidden in the pot-holder drawer. Maurey called sugar white death, but she made an exception for my cornbread.

  Roger’s face jerked toward the dark window and his eyes widened and a moment later headlights flashed on the log gate out by the road. I opened the oven door with the toes of my left foot and fondled in the cornbread. In the yard, the Suburban engine coughed, doors slammed, boots knocked snow off against the porch.

  Then Maurey was in the kitchen, hugging me. I felt her face on my neck. I patted the thick hair on the back of her head and smelled her jojoba shampoo. She cried a few seconds, less than a minute, as I looked across at Chet, standing inside the door with his hands at his side. Toinette’s music stopped and she appeared at the other door, bow in hand.

  Maurey pulled away and looked at my face. We’re almost the same height.

  She said, “Life is the shits.”

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. Thanks for being here.” She moved off to hug Toinette.

  I stepped toward Chet, then stopped, raised a hand, lowered it. I smiled a weak I-mean-well smile, and he smiled back “I know. It’s okay.”

  There was more boot kicking at the front door before Pud and Hank came in. They must have been in the bunkhouse, waiting. Hank certainly wasn’t shy about touching Chet. They bear-hugged like athletes. Pud held Maurey. Toinette looked sad and pregnant. Auburn carefully kept his eyes off the adults, but Roger was a camera. I got the definite feeling he could see right through emotions, that he knew every coloration of every relationship in the room—whose love was pure and whose tainted by self-interest—and I failed the test.

  Chet hung his coat on the deer antler rack by the door. “I need to use the phone,” he said. “There’s friends in New York…”

  Maurey broke from a muffled conversation with Pud. She said, “Use the one in our room,” meaning Hank’s old room, where she and Pud moved when Pete needed a bed. Maurey looked at me and said, “Come help me pick out Pete’s clothes.”

  “I was fixing to make dumplings.”

  “Dumplings can wait.”

  ***

  I gave Toinette instructions on when to pull out the corn-bread, then I followed my friend into her dead brother’s room. I found her sitting on the dead brother’s bed, staring glumly into the dead brother’s open closet doors.

  “Did you know it’s illegal to cremate a body naked?” she said.

  “That’s not something I’ve thought about too often.”

  “You have to buy a coffin, too.”

  “I guess the funeral homes were afraid they’d lose money when burial went out of style.”

  “Why didn’t you disagree with me when I said life is the shits?”

  I almost had disagreed, but we were making such nice eye contact I couldn’t spoil it. “Didn’t seem like the time to argue,” I said.

  Maurey pooched her lower lip the way Shannon does when she doesn’t get her way. “Life isn’t the shits,” she said. “Life is fun; it’s all this death that’s the shits.”

  I sat on the bed beside her. “It’s not death either. It’s loving people who die.”

  She doubled up her fists. “Death is boring. Boring, boring, boring. I hate death. It ruins everything.” She looked at me fiercely. “You better not die on me.”

  “I won’t if I can help it.”

  “Just don’t.” She started to cry again.

  I took her hands and unclenched the fists, then held them. We sat silently, remembering other deaths.

  “The doctors said he had another month,” I said.

  “Doctors say whatever they think you want to hear. That’s why so many of them drink—they can’t stand themselves.”

  “Roger screamed when he heard about Pete.”

  Maurey looked at me. “Aloud?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how loud. I was hoping he would talk after that, but he clammed right back up. I don’t think he even remembers screaming.”

  Maurey extracted her hands from mine and looked down at her palms. She has extremely small hands. Twenty years of working outdoors had left them tough. “He’s been stealing food.”

  “Roger?”

  “He hides rolls and cheese in his box springs. I found half a chicken in the laundry bag.”

  Maurey blinked quickly and her voice caught on a sob sound. “I can’t do anything for him, Sam. I say, ‘Bring me your dried-up drunks, your abused babies, all those lost souls,’ but I can’t do a damn thing for any of them. I let my own brother die.”

  I waited a while and said, “You helped me.”

  “You don’t need help. You need someone to convince you you’re not a jerk.”

  So that was it. “You’re not a savior.”

  “That makes us even.” She laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of a person amused. “Now, if you were dead, what would you want to be cremated in?”

  I thought. “My Los Angeles Dodgers boxer shorts.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you? Pete doesn’t even own boxer shorts. Didn’t.”

  We chose a light blue Van Heusen shirt with short sleeves and a three-tone sweater Pete and Maurey’s mom knitted while she was in rehab. One look at the sweater and you knew the creator was schizophrenic.

  “Nobody’ll see it,” Maurey said. “Pete didn’t want a viewing.”

  She chose a pair of white slacks and I accidentally said I wouldn’t be caught dead in those. That got Maurey giggly, which happens to distraught people. Hysteria means the same thing with either laughter or tears.

  I wanted Pete to wear dress J. Chisholm cowboy boots; Maurey couldn’t see wasting a pair of boots.

  “Pud can have them, he and Petey are the same shoe size.”

  “Pud doesn’t want boots off a dead guy, even if Pete was your brother.”

  “Is.”

  “Why do women always give away dead people’s clothes?”

  “Bodies in caskets are barefoot. Everybody knows that.”

  “That’s an eighth-grade myth. They’re not going to put a suit on someone and leave off the shoes.”

  “Pete asked that you give his eulogy.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  Nausea came on so fast I sat down. I clutched the boots to my chest, smelling the leather smell that carried a hint of aftershave. He must have packed toiletries in the boots to save room in his suitcase. The thought of standing up in front of a bunch of mourners and saying “Here’s what Pete’s life meant” scared the wadding out of me. I can’t sum up a person. It’s in my genes that whenever I try to be sincere I come off shallow. The mourners would look up at me and think glib.

  “Why not you or Chet?” I asked.

  “He didn’t want to put us through that.”

  “And he did me?”

  She smiled—like a cat. “You writers are supposed to be good with words.”

  Pete’s pillow still had sweat stains where his head had lain. You could make out the form of his body in the mattress.

  “This is his way of getting back at me for being heterosexual,” I said.

  “I’d say it’s more like Pete’s last joke.”

  “He always had a dry sense of humor.”

  Maurey held a beaded Arapaho belt up to the mirror. “You’ll do it, won’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  She smiled at me in the mirror. “You think this belt goes with white slacks?”

  ***

&nb
sp; Pud knocked at the open door. “Telephone for you guys.”

  I said, “Someone called us?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “This is a trick to get me and Lydia talking.”

  “It’s your daughter.” Pud looked at Maurey. “Yours too. Hank telephoned her with the news about Pete and she wants to talk to both of you. Sam first.”

  I said, “I understand,” even though I didn’t.

  There was a phone in Pete’s room. I sat on the bed with it in my hand and one finger holding down the button, preparing myself to communicate. You have to be ready for these things. I’d missed Shannon terribly the last few weeks, but still, talking to her would be difficult. She knew about Katrina Prescott, Gilia, Atalanta, Clark Gaines, Lydia, and everything else I was ashamed of. Lydia had disappointed me so often when I was young, I’d sworn never to disappoint my daughter, and now I’d gone and done it, big time.

  I released the button and said, “Hi.”

  Hank went through the good-byes and take cares, then it was just Shannon and me.

  She said, “I’m sorry about Uncle Pete.”

  “He was a nice man.”

  “I’d like to come to the funeral.”

  I hadn’t expected that. “He wanted to be cremated.”

  “That’s what Hank said.”

  “It’s illegal to cremate a body naked.”

  Shannon coming to the funeral felt strange. Somehow, I had the idea that North Carolina was way down there and Wyoming way up here and I was the only one allowed to cross between them. I like keeping my separate lives separate.

  “Can I come?” she asked.

  “Of course you can come. I don’t know what day the funeral is.”

  “Friday.”

  “Hank told you?”

  “He said Thursday is too soon for arrangements and they didn’t want it on Christmas Eve or Day because that would spoil Christmases from now on.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So I can catch a flight out tomorrow.”

  “Put the ticket on my Visa.” I counted to ten. “And bring Eugene if you want to.”