Sorrow Floats

by Tim Sandlin

  The corral poles were part of me, and the watering hole off the creek, and the boneyard where pieces of machinery older than Wyoming rusted into the sage. The ranch cycles were so soaked into my blood that on our land I always knew what time it was and which way was north. You feel those things when your identity becomes a location. The outside world made me nervous.

  Back over at the house, Lloyd and Hank had pulled Dad’s old rodeoing trailer over to Moby Dick and were in the process of winching it onto the hitch and hooking up brake and lights wiring. From the corral, I could see a big dent I put in the trailer by backing it into an A&W billboard. The billboard fell on an empty fireworks stand and knocked it flat. Dad laughed until tears dripped off his beard.

  I didn’t see any urgent need for Hank to loan us that particular trailer. Self-destructive tendencies can’t possibly benefit from a father memory following your backside across America.

  ***

  Shane had his back to the work, facing the horses and the sun. It was the time of year people liked to face the sun. He looked at me and popped a cookie. “Tonto says you used to ride horses.”

  “Used to?” I said.

  “Tonto?” Hank said.

  “You might think you’re hot stuff, but even before you fell off the deep end you could never have matched Kate at horsemanship. There was a competent woman. You don’t look so very competent.”

  I advanced on him. “Maybe it’s time you and me duke it.”

  Shane was amused to no end. “I don’t fight helpless women.”

  “I do fight fat cripples.”

  I could tell calling him a fat cripple earned me a little respect. Most people bend so far over backward not to say the wrong thing around the handicapped, to the point where the bending over becomes obvious and an insult. Shane was one of those cripples who wanted the same abuse given normal men.

  He turned the chair so we weren’t facing head on. “I did not mean to upset your feminine sensibilities. All I meant was Katharine Hepburn did things you couldn’t do even before you became a drunk.”

  I looked over at Lloyd, who chose to stay noncommittal, then back at Shane, who seemed to be leading with his belly.

  “Watch this, Humpty-Dumpty.” Sticking two fingers in my mouth, I let out a whistle. Very little causes me pride, not since college, anyway, but my whistle does call ’em in for lunch. Not a boy in Teton County could out-blow me.

  Frostbite’s ears jumped alert and his head swiveled. As he came at a canter, you couldn’t help but admire the skewbald Daddy-killer. The old guy was fourteen now, but he still lifted his feet like a colt, and his eyes still sparked with the glory of performance.

  At a twenty-foot gap, I held my hand palm forward and Frostbite stopped on a nickel. A dime. World’s greatest trick horse.

  “Nobody’s rode him since Buddy,” Hank said.

  Frostbite and I locked brown eyes on blue. Faith in each other leapt between us like lightning between a thunderhead and a mountain spire. Horse and woman became a unit.

  Hank stepped next to me. “I advise against it.”

  Shane said, “If you break your neck, don’t ask to use my chair.”

  I gave the hand signal for Frostbite to turn around. Exhaling calmly, I said, “No problem. We haven’t lost a thing.”

  My rear mount was smooth as water over a rock. The instant my jeans touched his back, Frostbite became motion, I became Frostbite. We’re talking exhilaration—the refinding of lost enthusiasm.

  I grasped the mane with my left hand and did a right vault, then reversed it and bounced dirt on the other side. For the first time I wished I hadn’t cut my hair. Long hair streaming in the wind is a trip when you go fast. You should see Hank do the arrow-beneath-the-belly Indian trick. On a full-blast horse death doesn’t mean shit.

  As he hurled toward the fence I gently tugged Frostbite’s mane and touched him with my left leg. He did a flying leftward U-ey, and ZOOM, we’re charging back toward Moby Dick. I placed both palms on his back between my thighs, straightened my legs, and lifted myself into a rear spin—same trick Mary Ellen McKenzie had been trying on the mechanical horse at Kimball’s before she mocked me.

  Forward again, I made a crowd appreciation check. Hank watched with both hands on his hips. Shane knocked his harmonica against his dead leg. He would say something tacky, but I would know I’d shut him down. The slug couldn’t crap at me anymore.

  I brought both feet under my body with my weight on my toes. Time for the free rump stand followed by the back flip dismount. This would knock their socks off—all except Lloyd, who wasn’t wearing socks.

  ***

  I came to on the ground in the shade of the ambulance. This time the progression went in reverse—black spots turning to yellow turning to three round faces staring down at me. Hank’s was angry, Lloyd’s concerned. Shane was so entertained he practically bubbled.

  Hank said, “I won’t bury another member of your family.”

  In times of embarrassment, always fall back on bravado. “Fucking horse broke stride.”

  Shane giggled. “That’s what Katharine said.” Hank knelt to manipulate my legs.

  I must have landed on my shoulders because that’s what hurt the most, other than my already battered ego. “Frostbite jumped a chiseler hole. He’s lost his touch.”

  Lloyd didn’t blink. “Would you have fallen if you hadn’t had a drink?”

  Shane gave his hideous hoot. All three chins contracted like a frog’s neck when it croaks. “She’d have stayed up longer with more to drink, not less.”

  I closed my eyes. I’d crashed any number of times learning the tricks. This didn’t mean a thing; I wasn’t a washed-up, twenty-two-year-old has-been.

  Hank touched my ankle. “Can you move your feet?”

  “Of course I can move my feet. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, I’m tired of this godforsaken dump.”

  ***

  Dothan trained Mae West to buck whenever she heard “Chewy Chewy” by the Ohio Express. Dothan loved the Ohio Express, which tells you as much about his depth of character as the calendar with Kiwanis meetings marked by a star.

  He used to bring his portable eight-track tape player to the ranch and sit on the corral fence listening to music while I exercised Frostbite and a couple others. Dothan was only there waiting for me to get done so he could take me up the hayloft and get straw in my pubes. Every now and then while I rode I’d catch him chunking a rock at Mae West’s butt, always when the same song was playing. I didn’t make the connection until after the incident.

  I should have been suspicious when Dothan volunteered to wrangle the senior class trail ride. He told Sam Callahan that Mae West had once been ridden by Ernest Hemingway, so of course Sam had to have her. You should have seen Sam sit that horse—rigid as uncooked spaghetti. He posted constantly like we were in England. On turns he yanked the reins so hard she did a complete circle, then he overcorrected and circled her back the other way.

  A mile up the Forest Service lease fence I was stalled behind Sam while he tried to stop Mae West from grazing. Her head would dip down to grass level and he’d jerk the reins, which she took as the signal to back up, so she would, and behind her, one at a time, the whole senior class of GroVont High would retreat down the mountain.

  That’s when Dothan popped “Chewy Chewy” into the eight-track.

  Mae West’s first kick grazed Frostbite’s jaw and he spooked, so I missed a second or two of the action, but when I turned myself back around she was sunfishing and Sam was laid over on her side hanging on by the saddle horn. And screaming. You never heard such a noise.

  He stayed with her quite a while, considering. I remember mixed in under Sam’s screams and the horse’s snorts, this whiny-ass voice going, “Chewy, chewy, chewy, chewy.”

  Mae West charged the fence, dug in her heels, and Sam flew over h
er head and front-flipped into barbwire. All in all, I thought it was semifunny—one of Dothan’s better sick jokes—but then I’d been thrown off my share of horses, and I knew the world doesn’t end. You get back up and get back on.

  Sam had no such perspective. He never figured how he’d been had, but in his heart Sam knew somebody other than Mae West caused him a backside full of holes. He wouldn’t speak to anyone for days, not even me. Just sulked in his room and wrote stories about how all horses are minions of Satan and must be shunned or they will kill.

  11

  Next came a drive all the way into Jackson to cash Hank’s check, then back to GroVont for the beer. An argument broke out over who got to hold my money. My money. Imagine the gall. Shane said I’d spend it or misplace it or give it away to a worthy charity because that’s what drunks do with their money.

  “I’ve never misplaced money in my life.”

  “Just children.”

  Lloyd dropped the two of us off at Lydia’s with the promise to come back in an hour with the load of beer and a pint of Yukon Jack.

  “You won’t on-purpose accidentally forget Jack?” I asked.

  “Drinkers only quit when they want to; no one has stopped yet from being out of supplies at the moment.”

  “Well, I don’t want to, so you don’t forget.”

  On Lydia’s two front steps, Shane taught me the tip-back, pull-up method of getting him into places.

  “I go up stairs backwards and down stairs forwards,” he said. “That way if I fall, I land on my face and don’t get hurt.”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  I set Shane up in Lydia’s living room with a Dr Pepper and a Progressive Peacemaker magazine. He picked Sam’s short story off the TV table and stared intently at the title—“Kiss Your Elbow Enterprises.”

  “My grandmother used to make my sister and me kiss our elbow every night before bed,” he said.

  “No one has ever kissed their own elbow. Unless their arm got ripped off.”

  From somewhere beneath him, Shane extracted a wicked little pocketknife. That chair was a general store on wheels. It was like in the cartoons when the coyote needs a weapon and he reaches out of the picture and comes back with an Acme anvil or six sticks of lit dynamite, only Shane did the trick between his legs.

  “I used to kiss my elbow often,” he said. “I was a special little lad.”

  Some crocks are better left alone. I went into Sam’s room for shower paraphernalia, and when I came back out carrying my towel and Sam’s old razor, Shane had pulled his right leg up so the ankle crossed his left knee and taken off his saddle oxford. He was intently reading Sam’s story.

  I stopped to check Shane out as a traveling companion. He wasn’t grotesquely obese or anything, just your regular fat, but the slump posture in the chair and that dull ruby face made him appear grosser than he was. You know how a Scotch drinker’s nose swells up red and laced with tiny exploded blood vessels? Shane’s whole face was like that. And his head didn’t sit on his neck steady; it sort of bounced or quivered or something.

  His couldn’t have been an easy life, what with ostracism for being hideous and all. Maybe the lies were compensation, maybe an insecure boy blustered from fear under all those flabs of suet.

  Without looking up at me, Shane said, “I used to write novels. They were rather good, but the literary life is ghastly pretentious, so I quit. Pretension is the one flaw I simply cannot stomach.”

  ***

  Lydia came home while I was doing the legs and pits job in the shower. She walked right into the bathroom and sat on the toilet where I could see her through the semi-transparent shower curtain. She dropped her jeans over her ankles, but her black-with-red-lace-trim panties stayed up while she peed. Crotchless panties! On a weekday! The mind boggles at what perversions she and Hank must practice in private.

  “Maurey,” she said, “Aqualung is trimming his toenails in my living room.”

  “That’s Shane. I think he’s harmless.”

  “No guest who trims his toenails is harmless. Did he bring his own furniture?”

  “He’s in a wheelchair. Didn’t you see the wheels?”

  “I didn’t look.” She stood and pulled up the jeans that were two sizes too tight. “Didn’t I tell you again and again Prell strips every drop of moisture from your head.”

  “Better than shampooing with vegetables.”

  She picked my Prell off the side of the tub and dropped it in the trash can. “Might as well shave your head again.”

  I managed to dry myself without looking in the mirror.

  Cutting back through the living room, Shane sat waving Sam’s story around, feeding Lydia this cock-and-bull about her son being a literary lion of the first degree. Unlike me, Lydia wallows in flattery. Tell her she has nice hands or is politically vibrant or was a good mother, and pretty soon she’ll revert to southern belle and start batting her eyelashes and offering you canned cashews. Takes an insecure person to believe the compliments of strangers, I always say.

  Packing consumed all of five minutes. I came through college when straining to look good was considered hypocritical. Powder and paint make ’em what they ain’t. Paddin’ and stuffin’ don’t add nothin’: fallout from the Janis Joplin beauty school, I guess. I wasn’t a hippy chick—no burned bras and body lice for me—but I was no sorority social climber, either. Two pairs of boots, corral and town; flip-flops for in the car; two pairs of Wrangler’s; three shirts, two for regular everyday and a nice Neiman Marcus yoked deal with a fitted waist, mother-of-pearl snaps, and baby-doll puffed sleeves for rodeos and funerals; five pairs of cotton panties; a raft of socks that didn’t match, but that didn’t matter because they’d be under my boots; and two bras just in case we went somewhere I couldn’t bounce.

  After Dad died I fumigated his wicker trout creel to create a new style in purses. It was way cool with a deep place for my notebook, keys, pints, and whatnot and little places for Carmex and change. I slid Hank’s three hundred dollars into the waterproof pocket up top where you’re supposed to keep your fishing license and extra leaders.

  I put in a pair of silver hoop earrings Shannon gave me for Christmas. The last time she came to Wyoming we bought a gallon of ice cream one night and pierced each other’s ears. You should have seen it, the seven-year-old and the twenty-one-year-old, both terrified of running a knitting needle through our body, yet giggling like sisters. I don’t know which scared me most, sticking Shannon or Shannon sticking me. We ended up with blood and ice cream all over both of us. Being a mom can be more fun than sex or alcohol put together.

  ***

  I carried a suitcase, Sam’s day pack, and the creel purse into the living room to find Shane with his claw dipped in a bag of Pepperidge Farm gourmet crackers and Lydia hovering, ready to serve his smallest whim.

  She didn’t seem surprised to see the suitcase. “Did you know Mr. Rinesfoos practically began the civil rights movement? That’s how he lost the use of his faculties, in a Klan riot in Birmingham.”

  “Who’s Mr. Rinesfoos?”

  Shane popped a fistful of gourmet crackers through his lips. “Three sheeted racists held me while three more forced my Negro pal Isaiah to bite the curb. As they stomped the back of his curly head, I broke free and began pummeling the Grand Wizard, but their bedpost clubs crushed all the vertebrae in my spine.”

  Lydia bought the rap. “That is so admirable. I’d love to give my body for a cause.”

  Shane and I let that statement lie between us on the floor. I think it was such an obvious opening that he suspected a trap. Or maybe Lydia was too easy for an all-star lech to bother with. Instead I blindly jumped into the good-bye thing. I’m not big on good-bye things. Every vacation when the time comes for Sam and Shannon to head back south, I make an excuse and bag out a few minutes before they leave. I never even said goo
d-bye to Dad, and he’s dead.

  Lydia hugged me and told me not to commit suicide or buy flowers from hippies on city street corners because the money went straight to the Moonies. I can tell I’m not latently gay or anything because I don’t initiate hugs with women. Men either, come to think of it.

  “You heading straight out from here?” she asked.

  “After we pick up the tent and drop by the post office. Might as well take Sam his tent.”

  “You tell that overgrown horse’s turd to send me money. It’s a disgrace how he treats his mother.”

  “I thought the story was written by a youngster. Surely you are not old enough to have an adult child?” Shane asked.

  Lydia’s forehead wrinkled in spite of all that Swedish paste she glops on it. “Of course I don’t have an adult child. Will you see Annabel before you leave the valley?”

  I wanted a drink right now. “Doesn’t seem to be much point.”

  “Maurey, there’s not much point in anything you do.”

  ***

  Dear Dad,

  I told Hank to shoot Frostbite and sell his hooves to Purina. We’ll use the guts for bearbait and give the hide and meat to the religious fanatics up in Buffalo Valley. I’m leaving on a tour of southern cities tonight. You can reach me through Lydia Callahan.

  Write, wire, or call,

  Maurey

  ***

  Loaded, oiled, and gassed, our trio in the belly of Moby Dick headed across Togwotee Pass and into what people in Jackson Hole call Out There. Shane babbled nonstop from his perch in back, Lloyd held the steering wheel with both hands, his head cocked, listening closely to M.D.’s engine as it strained against the trailer and Coors. My Jack bottle that I’d named Scout after Tonto’s horse snuggled in his position between my thighs on the passenger seat.

  On the long curves, I looked back at a killer spring sunset between the Grand and Mount Moran. The peaks were majestic, the valley floor a warm, dark green. Auburn did not know I was no longer a cry away. This was stupid. I almost told Lloyd to pull it over and let me go. Only a true idiot would walk away from paradise. Only a total idiot would leave her child to smuggle bad beer and go into hiding from somebody. Who was I hiding from? Dothan, my son, my hometown, myself?