Sorrow Floats

by Tim Sandlin

  As Lloyd double-clutched us onto the interstate and into the wind, I saw a grotesque vision of Shane’s nail in the night sky, right up near the handle of the Little Dipper. Repulsive sights have a way of burning themselves into my brain.

  “You think Shane gets hard-ons?” I asked.

  “He talks about them often enough.”

  “But does he get them?”

  Lloyd cracked his window. “Do witches fly and leprechauns pass out gold?” He seemed to think that answered my question.

  ***

  I have an ambiguous relationship with the penis. Love/hate. Make that fascination/disgust. Fascination to touch, disgust to look at. Fascination at what they can do, disgust at what they do do. The dick is so comical, dangling in space like a lost thumb. And so vulnerable. It simultaneously begs to be cuddled and castrated.

  Sam Callahan’s wasn’t the first penis I ever touched, although I told him it was. When I was seven, almost eight, we went to the county fair and a log peeler named Walt Walsowski started talking to me in the livestock barn, next to the goat pen. He said if I closed my eyes and held out my hands, he would give me some M&M’s.

  Until I peeked, I thought he’d handed me a trout.

  In the car going home, I told Mom what Walt had done. “The second I touched his thing he peed gobbledigook all over my shirt.”

  She acted as if she didn’t hear.

  “What was that stuff, Mom? Walt laughed and said next time he would melt in my mouth, not in my hand.”

  She was furious—at me. “Maurey, you are disgusting and evil. Don’t you ever talk like this again.”

  Can you believe it? The man blows his wad on a seven-year-old girl and the girl is the one made to feel dirty. No wonder I take my romantic episodes from bottles.

  ***

  Scout and I consummated our love on the downhill side of Elk Mountain, west of Laramie. Weak knees, nauseated stomach, and uncontrollable eyelids—the signs of orgasm and drunkenness pretty much match. Only difference is you don’t have to tell a pint how great he was.

  We expressed our passion quietly, hiding our secret from Lloyd, who stared unblinking into the Wyoming night. By closing one eye, I could focus on his cheekbone and bare shoulder, at least for a moment, but Moby Dick had the spins. The red running lights fell through the roadway, and Interstate 80 heaved. I enjoy a good buzz, but Scout was making me sick. After great effort, I cranked the window down and got the vent open. Lloyd glanced over without a question.

  Should I throw up? Pass out? I could always die again. I held Scout to my lips and inhaled from his mouth. Wetness ran off my chin onto my lap, and when I looked down Scout fell to the floor.

  ***

  The first time I passed out from alcohol was Labor Day night before the start of my senior year at GroVont High. Kim Schmidt drove a Ford load of us to a sixteen-man rubber raft padlocked to a dock where Jackson Lake Lodge launches their Snake River float trips.

  Dothan mixed this obscene southern half beer-half wine concoction he called a scrotie-oatey. Even more obscene, the beer and wine was Colt 45 and Ripple. Stuff stagnated in your mouth like swamp water.

  We leaned on the inflated sides of the raft and laughed too loud while the moon came over Mt. Leidy and put shadows all up and down the river. The boys bragged about other times they’d gotten drunk and told Spanish fly stories. The only other girl there chain-smoked Larks and said her daddy would smash the first boy who tried to touch her. I watched the water until the illusion of our raft moving upstream made me queasy, then I watched clouds cross the moon, but that made me feel funny, too.

  After three, maybe four scrotie-oateys Dothan said he’d throw me in the river if I didn’t show the guys my breasts. I didn’t care. I thought I had okay breasts because I’d had a baby. Most of the guys had never seen a tit—I made their summer. The girl called me revolting and said she was going to tell the pep club board, which she never did because three minutes later she was barfing her brains into the oar frame. My advice is never mix beer and wine in the same can.

  Everyone but Dothan disappeared. He tried to nail me, but I stopped the son of a bitch—threw up right in his face. He called me a frigid slut, then I was all alone crying in a half inch of water on the bottom of the boat.

  Next thing I remember is looking up to see two Jackson Lake Lodge boatmen and a family of tourists as they started loading for a breakfast float.

  ***

  God, I had to pee. I ran from store to store in the shopping center, begging for a bathroom. My bladder felt knitting needle pain, my thighs quivered, but at each stop the hollow-faced cashiers shook their heads and said, “No restroom.” Liars. Assholes. Somewhere, every store hid an employees-only closet with a commode, sink, pink powder soap in a dispenser, and a sign that said workers must wash their hands before returning to the job. I ran into the central plaza, searching for a place to go. People were all around. They flew kites; they threw Frisbees. They watched from the edges of their eyes. I stood in the courtyard and shook as ravens landed on the church roof in a mass of squawking black. Staring people circled me. They held their children back so I couldn’t affect them. Shannon placed her hands over her mouth while next to her Pud Talbot pointed at my feet. The crowd broke into jeers and threw garbage at me—banana peels, used condoms, the centers of golf balls. From beneath my bridal gown, a pool of pale yellow liquid spread across the concrete floor into an ever-expanding half-moon. Dothan stepped from the crowd to wrap my face in Saran Wrap, over and over. Through the layers I saw Shannon and Auburn turn to leave, then my lungs burned and I woke up.

  ***

  God, I had to pee. I came awake in morning light in an empty ambulance. When I raised myself to look at the day a metal pressure stuck me above the bladder. Somebody’d fastened a seat belt on me. I wasn’t used to seat belts.

  The ambulance was parked beside a brick building with a red roof. My guess was church. The building was set down in a wide prairie of low juniper and big, round boulders that seemed sprinkled from the sky. In college we used to cross the pass to Fort Collins, Colorado, for basketball games and parties at Colorado State, although more often they came to us since the drinking age was nineteen in Wyoming and twenty-one in Colorado.

  Anyhow, bushy junipers meant Colorado to me. Church. Colorado. Not bad reasoning for someone about to pee their pants. The part I didn’t know was the whereabouts of my crew. The back end looked like a bomb had gone off, same as it did yesterday, but Shane’s chair was missing. Lloyd should have left a note.

  I took Scout with me, more for security and companionship than a drink. A lot more, actually, because he was empty and the ambulance floor smelled of Yukon Jack. I hate careless drinkers.

  The church door opened into a hallway with two doors on the right and one on the left. Left proved to be the side door to a sanctuary, the door for the priest or reverend or whatever. The casket-looking altar was covered with a green rug but the cross didn’t have anybody dead on it, which ruled out Catholic. My guess was Episcopal or Presbyterian. The lectern came with an attached pencil-thin reading light, and Fundamentalists don’t go in for reading lights. Gets in the way of Bible thumping.

  I can’t say I was still drunk, but early morning equilibrium was a problem. Back in the hall, I lurched left, grazed the wall, then got up momentum and more or less fell sideways through the second door and into an AA meeting.

  Even though I’d never been to one, I knew right away what it was. Drunks in bars had told me how well lit the room would be and how everyone would be smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from Styrofoam. Eight or nine people stopped whatever interesting thing they’d been doing to go into those blank-faced stares that strangers do when you show up somewhere unexpected. Lloyd sat on the left in his overalls with no shirt. Shane was at the head of the table in his chair. He was leaning toward a pregnant woman who looked about seventy years ol
d. Maybe I’d get pregnant at seventy to balance off having been pregnant at thirteen.

  “Toilet.” My voice was a crack.

  “Through there on the left,” said a man in a Century 21 gold blazer.

  I pointed at a door by the coffee urn and he nodded.

  What a leak! Sometimes the pain is almost worth the release. About twenty seconds into the deal I realized how it must sound in the meeting room, so I leaned forward to turn the cold-water tap in the sink. No lie, I went two full minutes of continuous stream. That’s one of the dangers of drinking to unconsciousness.

  Afterward, when I leaned over to splash water in my face, I glanced up at the mirror and flinched. We’re talking gruesome. I tucked in the left side of my shirt where it’d come out, but that didn’t help much. I still projected degeneracy.

  On my return to the little extended family of formerly lost souls, none of the faces had changed—same who-is-this-deadbeat-with-the-Yukon-bottle stares. They looked infringed upon.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Would you care to join us?” the man in the gold blazer said. He seemed to be group leader. “Have some coffee.”

  “No, thank you. I can’t drink out of Styrofoam.”

  “You’re welcome here.”

  “I just had to use the restroom.” I turned to Lloyd. “We’ll be waiting in the truck.” He blinked.

  Outside the church, the day was pretty and fresh smelling, like real spring. Real spring doesn’t come to Jackson Hole until June, and then it only lasts like two days. Our falls and winters are glorious, and summer is a short paradise, but spring is mostly mud.

  I breathed deeply a couple of times, then dropped the dead Scout in a trash can, crawled into Moby Dick, and went back to sleep.

  ***

  I dreamed I was an alligator.

  ***

  Interstate Stuckey’s. The more lanes on a road, the lower the standards in curbside cafes. Once through the Safe-Tee glass double doors you could turn left and throw money away on “The Traveler’s Prayer” decoupage plaque, five-pound boxes of piñon nut brittle, bumper stickers to announce where you’ve been and how your profession does it, or coffee mugs for the World’s Greatest Mom. I didn’t qualify.

  Or you could turn right for food that would start a riot if they served it in prison. How do you make hash browns out of fiber-board, anyway?

  The waitress with fire-colored hair and a name tag that read Howdy on top of a peanut and Dorothea on the bottom said we were in Raton, New Mexico, gateway to Capulin Mountain National Monument. Right off she accused Shane of being a hypochondriac.

  “I bet you can walk fine.”

  “Bless you, my good lady, I only wish it were so.”

  “Let me see the bottoms of your shoes.”

  Shane pulled an ankle up over one knee, and Dorothea examined his sole. She didn’t comment on what she saw.

  “My cousin Glenna is a hypochondriac in a wheelchair. When Mr. Delvins got killed by a Coke truck, the moment Glenna found out she collapsed on the floor and hasn’t walked a step since.”

  “Maybe she has a psychosomatic disorder,” Shane said.

  “Not likely, Glenna’s from Dallas. We took her to four kinds of specialists and Oral Roberts’s ‘Hour of Faith,’ and nothing helps. Reverend Roberts got her to stand and fling away the chair, but then she fell on her face right on camera.”

  Dorothea sucked the tip of her pencil as she examined Shane for signs of health. “Glenna broke her nose on TV. Goes to show there’s times you should let well enough alone.”

  Lloyd ordered coffee, I had a chocolate shake, and Shane pigged on a cheeseburger and French fries so greasy they dripped. When he bit down on his burger the side facing me spit juice.

  “Trouble with Wyoming,” Shane said, “is no one there can cook meat properly. This excellent morsel reminds me of a cheeseburger I ate one August afternoon in San Bernardino, California. An Italian woman named Lucy cooked it on the sidewalk to show how hot the concrete was. She asked me to father her child, but I was in a religious order at the time that forbade impregnation. Needless to say, the pressure was too great and I eventually fell from grace.”

  Lloyd blew across the surface of his coffee. “We need a water pump. One we got won’t last two more days.”

  The radio finished a Goodyear tractor tire commercial and went into the noon farm-to-market report—hogs down, sheep up. A woman from the next booth dragged a little boy towards the ladies’ room while the kid yelled, “I’m a big boy, I don’t have to go in yours.” The father or whatever he was chewed three toothpicks and stared out the window at a Peterbilt with the engine running.

  I signaled Dorothea over to our table. “Do any radio stations around here carry Paul Harvey News and Commentary?” I asked.

  She chewed her lead a moment, then said, “My husband, Donnie, used to listen to him, but he can’t find it anymore.”

  She’d have gotten away with that if not for a Spanish-looking busboy who was hovering nearby. He said, “KRMC.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “KRMC has him just before ‘Lobo Sports Shorts.’”

  I turned back to Dorothea. Notice how polite I came on with the pardons and pleases. “Please, would you mind changing the station for a few minutes? I’d like to hear Paul Harvey.”

  “Yes, I mind.”

  “You’re interested in alfalfa futures?”

  “I’m not interested in changing the station.”

  From polite, I moved to understanding. “I notice you are varicosed. Being pleasant to customers might increase your tips and you could afford to have your legs stripped.”

  She pointed the wet pencil tip at my face. “Don’t be getting snappy with me, little girl. You’re from out of state.”

  Lloyd and Shane chose not to participate in the exchange. Intrusive son of a bitch that he was, even Shane knew not to step between two irritated cat women. But I was more than irritated, I was fed up. Last-straw city. People had been pushing me and stepping on me and tearing at me for weeks, and Stuckey’s was the place to stop it.

  I said, “I demand Paul Harvey.”

  “You can demand all day, honey, but you can’t have him.”

  As Dorothea turned back to the kitchen, I screamed.

  Remember Estelle Parsons in Bonnie and Clyde? She was subtlety personified compared to my howl. All activity on the dining side, the curio side, and, I’d bet, out in the parking lot came to a halt. Even the little boy in the ladies’ room shut up.

  I didn’t stop with the scream, either, but kept up a series of bloodcurdlers. I learned my scream from Dothan’s father, who used to call in coyotes by cutting toes off rabbits. Rabbits can really scream.

  Dorothea dropped her pencil and covered both ears with her hands. She shouted, “What’s wrong with her?”

  Shane stopped gorging himself long enough to raise his voice. “Hysterical digitalis. Her mind must be fed Paul Harvey’s voice once daily or she goes insane. If you have some liquid Demerol handy, we might be able to calm her down.”

  “We got no liquid whatever you said. Shut her up, she’s scaring the customers.” Which was true. All except the man with three toothpicks. He looked bored, a seen-it-all type with a reputation to uphold.

  Shane wiped the grease off his mouth with a napkin. “The alternative would be to tune in Paul Harvey.”

  ***

  Paul wasn’t worth much that day, anyway. All Watergate and a pithy story about his crusty neighbors in the Ozarks—one of those wisdom-of-simple-rural-folk deals. He didn’t even give a daily bumper snicker.

  14

  Dear Dad,

  The Indians in the picture are Navajo or Zuni or something, one of those tribes Hank calls Blanket Boys. He says anyone whose ancestors didn’t charge bareback across the plains killing buffalo is a wimp. Whatever
they are, the sight of turquoise gives ’em a hard-on. They’re like pickup truck-driving dope dealers, only these guys deal blue rocks.

  It takes all kinds.

  Maurey

  ***

  “You want to try your hand at driving?” We stood—or Lloyd and I stood while Shane sat—in the Stuckey’s parking lot, looking upwind at New Mexico. About all I could see between us and the mountains was brush and highway and used Pampers. Sparkles from broken beer bottles lined the road, giving a bleak fairy-tale look to things.

  “Sure, I want to drive. Listening to his blather could bore a person back into a coma.”

  Shane smiled up at me. He was relieving his fluids bag on the rear tire of a white Thunderbird with California plates. I took it as a political statement. Shane was smug because he’d hustled me for a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies based on that hysterical digitalis rap. I’d have gotten Paul Harvey without his help.

  “You ever drive a stick shift?” Lloyd asked. “Moby’s steering is somewhat loose, takes muscle on the turns, especially to the right.”

  “I can turn Dick. You’re worn out. Hop in back with the pervert and take a nap.”

  “Sharon used to love this ambulance. I can understand why she left me. I was a drunk like you are now, but I’m still surprised she left Moby Dick.”

  “Women don’t marry cars,” Shane said as he wheeled over to the side doors for load-up. “You think houses and drapes and dinette sets mean more to them than people, but get down to it, and men are the only gender can have meaningful relationships with objects.”

  “It has a manual choke,” Lloyd said. “Are you familiar with the manual choke?”

  Driving Moby Dick was a trip. Where the ignition should have been there was nothing but a blue wire, a red wire, and a switch. The stick shift was a four-foot rod with a hollowed-out nine ball stuck on top. Made changing gears into a sport. Reverse was where I expected first, which led to initial grinding that almost lost me the wheel. Lloyd would have taken it back, but he really was worn out from driving all night. The Jesus eyes were more puppy-after-electroshock. Or what I imagine puppy-after-electroshock would look like.