Social Blunders

by Tim Sandlin

  “I decided on a career when I saw eight full-grown cowboys hanging on every word of Jeopardy. Those old men had lived long, happy lives without TV, but three weeks after putting in the dish, they were junkies.”

  “So, you look at your job as servicing junkies?”

  “Heck, you should see the panic when a bandpass filter goes down. I charge seventy an hour, including travel time, which can be four or five hours back in the mountains.”

  This was a bigger scam than golf carts.

  “I could get two hundred if I wanted,” Pud said, “but that would be gouging.” He slid his eyes over at me again. “I’m no gouger.”

  “I believe you.”

  The hay shed wasn’t a shed in the North Carolina sense of the word. It was actually a large roof, larger than the roof on most houses, held up by telephone pole-looking logs about twenty feet high. The summer’s hay crop—or in drought years like this one, hay bought from Idaho farmers—was stacked in bales under the roof to keep dry, and a twelve-foot double-posted mesh fence surrounded the hay to keep out horses, porcupines, deer, moose, and elk, and anything else with a taste for grass.

  The system worked fairly well except when someone forgot to close the gate properly, which is what happened the day Pete died. An elk—Molly—had gone through the fence and was eating her way around the stack, costing the ranch money it didn’t have to spare.

  Pud stationed me just inside the open gate, which wasn’t any more a real gate than the shed was a real shed. It was a section of fence held in by push screws. Each side of the enclosure had a removable section so Hank could take bales from anywhere without having a long haul.

  “Stand here and when she comes your way, turn her out the open hole,” Pud said.

  “Turn her?”

  “Only don’t get under her feet. Molly’s stomped three cow-dogs to death in her career.”

  “How do I turn her without getting under her feet?”

  “Wave your arms and holler.”

  “She’s bigger than me.”

  “She doesn’t know that.”

  Pud walked off counterclockwise around the hay bales. From the northwest corner, Molly raised her head and chewed a mouthful of hay. She regarded me disdainfully—with good reason. She was wild, strong, and noble. I wasn’t. That animal knew I wasn’t bigger than her. She wasn’t stupid.

  I looked across the white pasture to the river and wondered idly if I was fixing to get killed. The thought didn’t disturb me as much as I would have expected. Mostly, I considered the uniqueness in a modern society of being killed by a wild animal. I always wanted to go out in a unique way. I also thought about how lousy Shannon would feel. She would wonder if her desertion last night caused me to flaunt risks.

  “Scat! Move it!” Pud’s voice came from around the corner of the stack.

  Molly ignored him. Six-hundred-pound animals don’t respond to Scat.

  A firecracker exploded at Molly’s feet. Pop. She jumped back and hit the fence, but didn’t move any closer to me. A string of firecrackers went off—Pop! Pop! PopPop! Molly walked ten feet or so down the aisle toward me, enough to clear the line of fire, then she stopped and went back to feeding.

  Pud appeared on the far side of the elk. “Black Cats aren’t motivational enough,” he said.

  By leaning toward the fence, I could see him working something out of his coat pocket. Pud is wiry and no taller than me. I’d always thought Maurey didn’t love me in the romantic way because I wasn’t tall, so it came as a shock when she took a boyfriend my size.

  “Pud,” I said, “when we were kids, everyone thought you were retarded. Why was that?”

  He stopped fiddling with whatever he’d been fiddling with and looked at me. “I’m dyslexic.”

  His eyes have always been so soft and open, not angry like Dothan’s, that I used to suspect something other than a demented home life made him different.

  He went on. “I couldn’t learn to read. My family and everyone treated me like a retard, so I believed them.”

  “I remember how mean the kids were to you at school.”

  “Maurey had me tested. All those years I thought I was stupider than everyone else, and then I found out I wasn’t.”

  “Must have had an amazing effect on your self-image.”

  “Like waking up and discovering you’re a different person.” He held up a round object. “You ready?”

  “For what?”

  “Cherry bomb.”

  I glanced from him to Molly. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  Her nose reacted first. The nostrils flared and her head jerked, then BLAM!—thirty times louder than a Black Cat. She leaped backward into the fence and bounced and came down running. I doubt if Molly even saw me before the collision. Her eyes were panicky wild, bugging pink whites and huge pupils. It happened way too fast for me to wave my hands and holler, or be smart and climb the fence. I think her inside shoulder hit me; whatever it was, I flew into the hay and she went out the fence gap.

  Pud pulled me to my feet. “That was great,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have stood my ground like you did.”

  After a few minutes, my lungs accepted air and my vision cleared somewhat. I almost convinced myself I’d been brave from choice; maybe I did stand my ground; maybe I had had time to jump. Bravery isn’t what you do so much as how you look back at what you did. I was so happy about surviving Molly, I tripped over barbwire under the snow and cut the living bejesus out of my hand.

  ***

  So I walked into the living room with my fist above my head, clenching a hard-packed snowball. The blood trickled down my arm and off my elbow.

  Maurey was still on the phone. She took one look at me and said, “I have to go, Lloyd, there’s another emergency.” She listened a few seconds and said, “I’ll call you back.”

  After she hung up I said, “You didn’t have to stop on account of me.”

  “I’m supposed to chat while you bleed on the floor?”

  Maurey got up and led me into the kitchen, where she kept one of the most complete first-aid kits a nonprofessional ever owned. It filled an old army mule pannier. A lot of doctors must have dried out on the TM because Maurey was prepared for any emergency. She had me stand at the sink and run cold water over the cut. It was at the base of my thumb and hard to see, what with the flow of blood, but there seemed to be a penny-size skin flap over a deep, ragged hole.

  “This’ll take stitches,” Maurey said.

  “Should we call an ambulance?”

  “I can handle it.”

  She dug through the pannier and came up with a sealed Baggie containing a sponge and this frothy brown liquid. As she leaned over my hand, her hair fell across her line of vision and she brushed it back over her ear in my favorite Maurey gesture.

  “Was that your sponsor on the phone?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Lloyd. Have you had a tetanus shot lately?”

  “Last year when a Vicksburg battery mount fell on my foot. Am I supposed to know Lloyd?”

  “Yes, you dip.” The brown liquid was some kind of alcohol and it hurt like the dickens. I gritted my teeth as Maurey scrubbed and talked. “I’ve told you about Lloyd and Sharon Carbonneau at least twenty times. They own a sports paraphernalia shop in Denver.”

  Even though the pain was tremendous, I resolved to follow the expected male code of toughness. “Sports paraphernalia?”

  “Caps and coolers. You can make a killing off any piece of plastic with a Denver Broncos logo on the side.”

  “‘Sponsor’ is an AA term, isn’t it?”

  “Your sponsor is the person you turn to when you’re in trouble.”

  “That makes you my sponsor.”

  She gave one last squeeze of brown antiseptic. “Are you still in trouble, sugar booger?”

&nb
sp; Was I in trouble, or was this despair the daily routine of going on? “Shannon’s moving out,” I said.

  Holding my sterile hand palm up, Maurey led me back to the kitchen table. “I know.”

  “She always tells you everything before me.”

  Maurey found a preloaded syringe and broke off the seal. “Shannon’s worried. She thinks you’ll fall apart without her at home to fuss over.”

  I stared at the syringe. Nobody had told me about a shot. “What did you advise?”

  “I said, ‘Birds gotta fly.’ If you fall apart that’s your fault. She can’t spend her whole life being needy so you have something to do.”

  When Shannon was little we had this ritual where I came in every night to tuck her into bed. The covers would be an awful mess and I would say, “What would you do without me?” and she would say, “Freeze in my sleep,” or something to that effect. But then one night I went into her room in my socked feet and found her reading Yertle the Turtle in a perfectly tucked bed. She didn’t see me at the door, so I returned to my room, put on shoes, and clumped back up the hall. When I re-entered Shannon’s bedroom, the covers were tangled up around her feet.

  I couldn’t decide if the trick to make me feel needed was touching or manipulative. Either way, finding out the truth took some of the glow off night-night.

  “This may sting,” Maurey said, and she stabbed me right in the cut.

  “Aighgh! Jesus!”

  “What a wienie,” she said.

  “Wienie? Let me poke a hole in you and see how it feels.”

  “Hank didn’t scream when I deadened his wrist.”

  “Hank’s stoic. It runs in his genes.”

  “Wieniehood runs in your genes. That’ll numb up in a minute.”

  My pain threshold has never been up to cowboy standards. The Callahan nerves are more sensitive than theirs, I think. Some people can see or hear better than other people, it only follows that senses of touch vary also, and mine is highly developed.

  “Doctors just give you all these medical supplies?”

  “They leave things with me when they go away.”

  Another plastic bag held a curved needle, like cobblers use on shoe soles, pre-threaded from a little bobbin of nylon thread. I said, “A doctor recovers from alcoholism and he’s so grateful he leaves behind a home clinic.”

  Maurey held the needle between her thumb and index finger as she studied my cut. “Actually, this particular doctor committed suicide.”

  She slid the needle into the flap and pulled it out of clean skin. It felt icky. No pain—just icky, like the ultimate in fingernails across a blackboard. “He couldn’t live with or without alcohol,” she went on, “so he hung himself in the barn.”

  “And you kept his stuff.”

  Maurey tied a complicated knot by dipping the needle through a loop and turning it sideways or something. I couldn’t follow the process. Afterward she snipped the thread and went back into my thumb for a second stitch.

  Without looking up, she said, “Pud asked me to marry him.”

  “Ouch!”

  “Don’t jerk your hand while the needle’s in it.”

  “You purposely waited until I was helpless to break the news.”

  “I was going to tell you. He only asked last night.”

  “I hope you said no.”

  Maurey drew the thread through and tied the knot. She pretended to be concentrating so hard I knew she wasn’t concentrating at all. She could easily have sewn my fingers together.

  “I said okay.”

  “Okay? The kid asks you to marry him and all you can say is ‘Okay.’ Isn’t that a bit halfhearted?”

  “Don’t be tacky with me, Sam.”

  “But you already married one Talbot and he was a shit.”

  “I’ve got the good brother this time.”

  Maurey and I had been best friends since before puberty. I thought we would always be the way we had always been, with our romantic lives a hobby we take seriously, but nevertheless, still a hobby. The nuclear family would always be each other.

  “You’ve lived with Pud for years. Why change what works?”

  Maurey pulled the third stitch. “Why are you freaking out?”

  “I think he’s taking advantage of your vulnerability over losing Pete.”

  She tied the knot hard and snipped the loose end with her scissors in a crisp snip of anger.

  “You’ve been married twice.”

  “But that was different. Neither of those women was as vital to me as you are.”

  “And they knew that. I don’t blame them for hating me. Did it ever occur to you that maybe—just maybe—putting me first over your wives had something to do with why your marriages failed?”

  “They were both emotional cripples. It had nothing to do with you.”

  Maurey’s eyes met mine fiercely. “Pud is my partner, Sam. My mate. You are my very good friend. You are important, yet secondary.”

  “But we always said friends matter more than lovers.”

  “You always said that. Pud is the number-one man in my life, Sam. You have to accept that.”

  “Fat chance.”

  7

  I kicked on my cross-country skis and headed up the creek. Got to get away. Got to go. Movement eases turmoil. The warm days earlier in the week had softened the snow and today’s cold hardened it, so basically I was skiing on ice. I fell twice before the back fence. A single rail showed above the snow and it was easy to sidestep over. Once across, I made my way into the aspens, where the going was a bit easier.

  How could she do this to me? When I got married I didn’t flaunt my true love in her face. I didn’t call her secondary. The first time I sent a postcard: “Got married. Wish you were here.” The second time, Shannon told her.

  When Wanda ran off with the illiterate pool man I thought I had a rock-solid support system—mother, daughter, closest friend—stable as a three-legged stool. Okay, the mother wasn’t too supportive, but I knew where she was. If I felt like talking to her, all I had to do was hold on to a check for a couple of days. I never dreamed Shannon would leave so soon. Maybe if I’d stayed in Greensboro after the Katrina fiasco she wouldn’t have discovered how easy I am to live without.

  What was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to North Carolina. The Manor House would be an empty tomb without Shannon. Besides, I’d had it with golf carts and serial sex. Gilia changed all that.

  For sure, I couldn’t stay in my cell at the TM Ranch forever. Spring would come; Madame Bovary would eat arsenic and die; Maurey would marry Pud.

  What I ought to do was move to a small Western town and find a log cabin within walking distance of a video store and a coffee shop, and do nothing for ten years but write novels. Not teenage sports fiction, but literature—Death in Steamboat Springs, Bucky Redux, a rewrite of the New Testament. I would be as serious as Richard Ford. Psychiatrists and doctors take sick people and bring them up to normal. I could take normal and make it better. My readers would stop being miserable; they would tolerate themselves and each other.

  Or if that was too ambitious, I could bring Babs and Lynette to Wyoming and set them up with their own Dairy Queen. They’d like that.

  The options were boundless. Almost too boundless, like the night I was left alone at the ranch and I tried to watch satellite TV. Four hundred channels gave me so many choices I spent the entire evening switching from satellite to satellite and didn’t watch anything for fear of missing something. When all choices are possible, realistic and unrealistic lose their edges. Here I was torn between writing a book that would make unhappy people happy and opening a Dairy Queen.

  When had I been happy in life? When Maurey was pregnant. When Shannon was young and needed me. Looking back at the recent past, I realized helping Babs and Lynette had given me a gut-level satisf
action that had been missing lately from Young Adult novels and sex acts on lost women.

  I was almost to the warm springs when I came through a gap in the aspens into a wide clearing covered by virgin snow, and I had a vision. Maybe not a vision in the Cheyenne sense, more like a waking dream—a visualization. It wasn’t something I could ever tell Maurey or Shannon about. They would laugh. Lydia would hoot.

  What I saw was a log lodge with a rock chimney next to a white clinic. Individual cabins lay scattered around the clearing connected by smooth paths. Golf carts hummed quietly back and forth between the cabins and the main lodge, carrying my women. A long driveway lined by cottonwoods and red willows looped up from the ranch. At a quaint wooden bridge spanning the brook, a tastefully small sign read Callahan Home for Unwed Mothers.

  Why not? I could hire nurses. We’d need a helicopter for hospital runs, but, hell, I had money. Nothing on Earth sounded nicer than to surround myself with pregnant teenagers.

  ***

  A doughnut of green clover about three feet wide encircles the warm springs all winter. The north side of the doughnut is the actual spring, which steams from the earth like a scene from Shakespeare—one of those Scottish moors haunted by witches. The hot water gurgles into a moss-lined pool, thigh deep at its deepest point, then, already cooling, it empties west into Miner Creek. The Miner Creek approach involves skiing across a log high above the rocks and ice, so my rest and meditation spot was on the east side, the gentle bank.

  I popped boots off bindings and planted my skis upright in the snow, then I sat on the clover and waited. I didn’t touch the water. When you first start visiting a warm springs on a regular basis, you check the temperature each time you return to see if the water really is as warm as you remember it. The TM spring was a tad cooler than I like bath water, warm enough to melt the surrounding snow but not so hot as to scald the tropical fish Maurey and other kids had released into it over the years. Back in early high school Maurey talked me into a full-moon skinny dip at twenty below zero. The water itself was cozy, warm and foggy as a Jacuzzi, but the seconds between leaving the water and drying off were among the most painful of my childhood. Seeing her naked was not worth hypothermia.