Sorrow Floats

by Tim Sandlin

  He didn’t nap in back with Shane but took over the passenger seat to keep an eye on me. Maybe he thought I had a hidden bottle and would drink on the job. If so, Lloyd was wrong. After a bottle makes me good and sick, I swear off forever, which generally becomes ten or twelve awake hours. Not long by AA One-Day-at-a-Time standards, but for most of those ten hours, sincerity is my middle name.

  Every now and then after Dad died I took a shot at quitting completely. I didn’t tell anyone because they’d give me guff and know if I failed. If you can’t do something, it’s best to pretend you don’t want to. The extended sobriety spells were generally kicked off at the end of a several-day binge-out when I did something so disgusting, so bottom-of-the-slime-barrel, that I turned on myself.

  The last time was in March when I was faking constipation so I could drink behind a locked door, and I dropped my Yukon on the bathroom floor and broke the bottle. Without even thinking, I grabbed an old hand towel, soaked up the liquid, and proceeded to suck that dirty rag dry. Cut the crap out of my tongue on broken glass.

  After that I made a deal with God, but he let down his end of the gig, which was to give me strength, so I let down my end, which was don’t drink.

  “Where’d you learn to scream like that?” Lloyd asked.

  I told him about Garth Talbot and the coyotes and rabbits. “He sold the coyote pelts for bounty and used the rabbits to make jackalopes. You may not have noticed, but every jackalope in Teton County is missing two or three toes.”

  Shane was popping cookies like he was in a competition. “Are you aware that if you slice the big toe off a person you effectively cripple him just as completely as I was crippled when that semi-truck jackknifed on Monarch Pass?”

  “What semitruck?” I asked, but it was too late. Shane was already off on the woman from Montana who’d lost a toe in a Sears Roebuck lawn mower. She liked doing it in apple trees or some-such nonsense. Taking my lesson from Lloyd, I was learning the tune-out technique. I didn’t acknowledge the words but let Shane’s sound float over me like a TV in the next room at a motel. Or say you live next to a motocross racetrack all your life, pretty soon you won’t be able to hear it. Park said the sun makes a loud roar, but we’ve all heard it all our lives and no one has ever not heard it, so no one knows it’s there. Except him.

  When I met Park he was sitting under a tree in the snow, crying. His childhood dog had died back in Maine, and his mother used an ink stamp to record the dog’s paw on the letter telling Park what had happened. So, I’m bopping along and there’s this boy with curly blond hair and pretty fingers holding a letter. I sat down next to him but kept it cool by not saying anything.

  He showed me the letter with his dead dog’s footprint at the bottom. He said he hadn’t cried in years and it felt kind of good to finally let go. Since then, I’ve discovered that’s what they all say when you catch them crying. “I haven’t been able to for years and it feels kind of good to finally let go.”

  Sam Callahan says the cowboy code allows for tears on two occasions: when your horse dies or when you hear “Faded Love” played on twin fiddles.

  With Park I took it as vulnerability beneath the hard, society-imposed shell of manhood. I was nineteen.

  Park and I talked for ten hours, first in the snow, then in the student union over countless cups of coffee, then on a lobby couch at my freshman dorm. After the Dothan-Rocky Joe fiasco I guess I was ripe for a sensitive man. He told me he’d read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, he listened to jazz, and my hair was the color of dolphins dancing off the New England coast. He showed me a poem about God and death that he’d never shown anyone.

  I told him about a man I saw die. I told him about Frostbite and my secret warm springs and that I had a five-year-old daughter named Shannon.

  We met the next day for breakfast, then we both skipped morning classes. I wanted to touch his hair and feel his lips, but after my recent history I thought it best to let Park make the first move. We must have been together two hundred hours before he held my hand. In the dark, watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—he yawned and pretended to accidentally bump my fingers during the bicycle scene.

  That same night he asked permission to kiss me, and I said okay.

  Two weeks later he showed me a poem and asked permission for another kiss. Maurey is a nickname. My real name is Merle—after the actress Merle Oberon—and Park had rhymed Merle with pearl and girl about thirty times.

  “This poem proves I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” I said, which was a first.

  “Perhaps we should consider expressing our love in the physical sense,” he said.

  I almost said “Fuck my eyes out,” but this was true love, right? The rules were different. This was what Sam Callahan and I had practiced for all those years ago, so that now I had found it, my innocence wouldn’t botch the deal.

  We did it Park’s way. We discussed the implications, the level of commitment, the possibility of pregnancy and options thereafter, the details of us both living in dorms where intermingling was against the rules. I suspect he was stalling for time while he figured out how to lay his hands on a rubber. I had one in my purse, but I couldn’t just whip it out. You don’t do that to a boy who writes you a poem.

  Finally, the selected evening arrived. His roommate was off at a debate tournament, and I could sneak up the stairs while the dorm counselor was watching Hawaii Five-O. Park had arranged like two dozen candles and lit so much incense the neighbors must have thought we were smoking pot. Freshman lore held that girls don’t do it unless you get them drunk, so Park paid someone to buy him a pint of peach brandy. I didn’t want to drink, I wanted to get nailed for love.

  He went into the bathroom for half an hour. I took off my clothes and hopped in the sack. He came out wearing a knee-length flannel robe with a rope belt and put The Sea by Rod. McKuen on his roommate’s stereo. Park asked me for the third time if he was pressuring me into something I really didn’t want to do.

  “I couldn’t live with myself if we did this and afterward I lost you,” he said.

  I reached out and grabbed his dick through the bathrobe.

  Afterward, I felt great. I don’t mean he was hot stuff or anything. He was nervous at first and couldn’t get a stiffie, then I did some advanced manipulation. He came practically on contact, but that didn’t matter. He was trainable. What mattered was how much better it had been with love involved. I got all emotional and tingly when he touched me, and just looking at the skin on his back excited me in a way Dothan couldn’t have pulled off with an hour’s worth of foreplay. Not that Dothan ever had time for foreplay.

  But Park was skittish. Something hadn’t lived up to his idealism.

  He got out of bed, put on his robe and tied the rope, and stood with his back to me looking out the window. “That wasn’t your first time,” he said.

  I should have smelled trouble. An alert woman would have caught the scary note in his voice, but I still felt way fine and close to him. “No, was it yours?”

  His sounded ready to cry again. “Of course not. I screw every girl I pick up.”

  By now I knew there was a problem. “Park. Hon, you know I have a daughter. How do you think I got her?”

  His shoulders slumped. “I knew you weren’t a virgin, but I didn’t expect you to be experienced. You had her so young, I hoped you’d been abused or raped against your will or something.”

  “Park, it’s okay. I didn’t love him and I do love you.” I patted the bed where we’d made love.

  He came and sat down next to me but didn’t touch my body. “Was I your second?”

  “No.”

  “Third?”

  “No.”

  He stood up and went into the bathroom. After a long while I got dressed, blew out the candles, and sneaked back down the stairs.

  I only saw Park once m
ore, in the cafeteria. He acted as if nothing had happened. We had one of those “Are you okay?” “Of course I’m okay,” “You sure you’re okay?” “Why wouldn’t I be okay?” conversations.

  Then he dropped out of school and went home to his mother in Maine. For several days, I wanted to die. I cried and ate, cried and ate, relived every moment we’d been together in my head, imagined his touch on my arm.

  One morning as I went over that crucial night for the hundredth time, it hit me. Park had said, “I hoped you’d been abused or raped.”

  Fuck him. Fuck love.

  I got out of bed, showered, stole some of my roommate’s makeup, and went to a fraternity party where I got drunk out of my mind and sucked off a jerk named Randy.

  The next day I made two rules: 1) Avoid poets and 2) Never fuck sober.

  ***

  You look at Lloyd in his sandals and overalls with no shirt and his brown shoe-polish-colored hair and you think he’s not the intelligent sort. But get to know him and he’s smart in the ways he needs to be smart. East of Clayton we came upon a cluster of gas stations at the Texas state line.

  “Better fill up here,” Lloyd said from the passenger seat.

  “We can’t be half-empty yet.”

  “See these three stations in New Mexico and none up ahead in Texas. That means state gas taxes are lower here, gasoline will cost a good deal more once we cross the line.”

  So I pulled over for gas and a Coke and some cashews. Shane finagled me for a pack of peanut butter-filled crackers. Lloyd looked under the hood.

  “Give me the map,” Shane said.

  I’d already studied it and knew the way to I-40. “We’re not lost.”

  “I enjoy knowing where I am at all times. It keeps me oriented.”

  I pretended to ignore him. I was approaching hour fifteen without alcohol—hour six of being awake—and the familiar knot was forming below my sternum. The skin on my forehead was tightening, and my breasts were nervous. I didn’t need a drink yet, maybe, although I wouldn’t have turned one down, I guess, but the uncomfortableness and unfairness made me cranky.

  “Lassie, would you please pass along the map?”

  “Are you faking Irish roots or calling me a TV dog?”

  A Popular Mechanics sailed into the windshield. “Why must every exchange be such a struggle with you, woman? Simply hand over the damn map.”

  He was right. No use being a jerk about it. I held the map toward him but out of his reach. “The name is Maurey. It’s not lassie, not honey, not little missy, and certainly not woman. See if you can say Maurey.”

  He glared at me. Lloyd opened the door and climbed in. “Bearing on the impeller shaft is about gone, I hope they have a water pump in Amarillo, ” he said.

  “Maurey, will you pretty-please mind passing the map back here?” Shane asked.

  I gave it to him. “Isn’t life more pleasant when you’re polite?”

  “Up your heinie with a stick.”

  One reason I was cranky was the heat. We’d moved in and out of spring in Colorado—I slept through it—and now we’d entered summer. Jackson Hole doesn’t prepare a person to deal with heat. Sweat trickles into my eyes and down my ribs. I get paranoid that my crotch stinks.

  “Keep an eye on the temperature gauge,” Lloyd said. “We might have to stop and drive at night.”

  The thought of getting stuck in this oven-ugly barren country made me crave whiskey. “I’m not stopping for nobody.”

  Twenty miles or so from Dalhart we passed a billboard that said Double Aught Ranch with a sideways figure eight thing under the words. The next fence post had a dead rabbit hung on it, then the next a dead bird—crow, I think—then the next a dead armadillo. Every fence post on the right side of the road was decorated by something dead and decaying.

  “This is gross,” I said.

  Lloyd blinked. “I’ve heard about this ranch. The owner has a fetish with predator control.”

  Less than a mile later the death-on-a-stick thing started up on the left side, too. Ranch kids see death often, so they don’t have the romantic Bambi-Daffy Duck notions of city kids, and you don’t marry into a family of taxidermists if you tend to be squeamish, but this was disgusting. Mile after mile of rotting corpses. Some posts had two animals of different species, some little more than a picked-over skeleton. At first it was only distasteful, but as the minutes passed and the dead flashed by faster than white lines on the highway, I swung from nauseous to scared.

  A great iron arch with the Double Aught brand in the middle marked the main ranch entrance. On each side of the brand two coyotes hung by the neck from hangman’s noose knots.

  “I’m going to cut them down,” I said.

  “They’ll just kill more to replace them,” Lloyd said.

  “The right thing to do would be to cut them down.” I wanted to stop, I tried to stop, but we were already by. The coyotes retreated into the rearview mirror, farther and farther away. I wanted to swing around and go back. I meant to, but the upshot of the deal is I didn’t.

  “There are some sick people in the world,” Lloyd said.

  “Sick people in Texas. They’d never get away with this in Wyoming.”

  Lloyd looked at me with sad eyes. “They get away with it everywhere. Nothing changes except in degrees.”

  I didn’t get it. Lloyd probably had in mind a deep symbolic lesson about the state of the world. If so, he was too profound for me. All I saw was two lines of slaughtered animals leading into the horizon. Far as I’m concerned, dead stuff is dead stuff. Doesn’t symbolize squat.

  I glanced back at Shane to see why he wasn’t relating the scene to some perverse woman he knew in his youth, but he had the map spread on his lap and hadn’t even looked up. Too busy figuring where he was going to see where he was.

  Lloyd rubbed his hand on his overalls leg. The material on the right thigh was shiny and soft from all that rubbing. “My father was an alcoholic,” he said, “and his father before him. It generally runs in families.”

  “None of the Pierce family has ever been alcoholics,” I said.

  “Until you.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic.” The north end of the Texas Panhandle must be the most bizarre country on Earth. All flat and scorched, makes you feel like a ladybug stuck on a dirty burger joint grill. A foreground full of rotting animals made the outlook disorienting. What was I doing outside Jackson Hole?

  Lloyd went on in an inflectionless voice. “Grandfather Abe volunteered for World War One. In New York City, the night before he was supposed to ship out, he got so drunk that he missed his boat. The army gave him two months in the stockade, but Germans torpedoed the troop ship he should have been on and twelve hundred soldiers died.”

  “There’s one hangover he won’t regret.”

  We reached another Double Aught billboard, and the parade of corpses finally came to an end, replaced by a view of cattle grazing around oil pumps and stock ponds.

  Pissed me off. “How can my ranch compete with these peckerheads? They’ve got year-round grass and money pouring out of the ground.”

  Lloyd wasn’t listening. “Old Abe stayed polluted most of the next forty-five years. In 1959 he drove his truck off an overpass in L.A., landed smack on a woman and two children in a station wagon.”

  “Dad bought Mom a station wagon in 1959—army green with wood trim. Petey and I pretended it was a fort.”

  “The mother lost her spleen, one lung, and her eyesight. Abe broke his arm. He still had a fifth between his legs when they cut him out of the wreck.”

  The Dalhart silos showed up on the horizon. Made the town appear as a thriving city off across a sea of winter wheat. I had to ask the question, even though I knew the answer and knew Lloyd was telling the story because he wanted to change me.

  “What happened to the children?”r />
  “Dead as those coyotes back there. They were so squished their daddy couldn’t separate out the parts to bury them in two caskets.” Lloyd rubbed some more. “Abe lost his driver’s license.”

  The deal was a gyp. People were all the time telling me grisly tales of alcoholics accidentally killing kids and swamping themselves with guilt. Why tell me? I wasn’t an alcoholic, and I sure as hell didn’t drive drunk.

  “If Abe hadn’t gotten soused in 1914, I wouldn’t be alive today,” Lloyd said, “but that family in L.A. would be.”

  “What you’re saying is God moves in mysterious ways.”

  Lloyd’s head snapped back and the cloudy look in his eyes went sharp. It was an amazing transition. “I’m saying God doesn’t work at all. Everything that happens to you, me, Shane, my Sharon, everyone everywhere, is nothing more than luck. The universe is random.”

  What a thought. “How can you say that and not drink?”

  He let his arm slide out the window into the wind. “AA every day.”

  15

  As we passed a sign that said “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas,” Shane threw what Lydia calls a conniption.

  “Turn right at the next highway.”

  “That’s no highway, Shane, you could barely call it a road.”

  “I don’t give a flyer what you call it, turn right.”

  I barreled on through, and that’s when Shane started screeching. “Stop her, Lloyd. Turn around. Are you going to stop? Stop this fucking car.”

  I stopped. It was either that or risk giving the guy a heart attack. I didn’t like the slob, but I didn’t want to kill him. My life had enough guilt.

  “Turn off the ignition,” Lloyd said. There wasn’t an ignition, so I popped the clutch and we lurched and died. Lloyd turned around to face the back. “Now, what’s the problem?”

  Shane’s face had gone from radish to beet. He looked like he might blow up. “The problem is I told her to turn and she didn’t turn. I said all along we shouldn’t bring a women’s libber. I hate libbers, they never do what they’re told.”