by Tim Sandlin
Lloyd realized the deal. “You’re going to sell that to someone as drugs.”
Freedom tapped the globe with his finger. “Fuck, no, I’m not selling this to no one. Honest men need not fear my medicine.”
“You’ll carry it on you and let them steal it,” I said.
Freedom grinned, exposing gaps between his teeth. “You’re pretty smart for a wino.”
Lloyd’s voice was soft and sad. “When they shoot it up they’ll die.”
“Ain’t that a shame,” Freedom said.
I’m hard to shock by weirdness, but, Jeeze Louise, there has to be limits. “Stealing isn’t worth killing anyone over,” I said.
“Is when they steal from me.”
“No, it’s not.”
Freedom turned on me, crouched like a rabid dog—or how I imagined a rabid dog would crouch. “Nobody rips off Freedom. Got that? Nobody. Any asshole fucks with me dies and damn well deserves to.”
“You just went off the disgusting scale.”
“Oh, yeah? Which one of us is the alcoholic?”
***
Freedom had never-ending depths in which to sink. I was beginning to think this sixth-level jive meant sectors of hell. After I got Lloyd’s money from the creel under the front seat, he asked me which one of them I was boffing.
“Boffing?”
“I bet on the cripple. You’re the kind of butch bitch who wants control. I bet you sit on his face, give him a smell, then run around the room making him crawl for it.”
“I’m not sick enough to imagine the shit you take for granted.”
“Or you’re doing it for both of them—fuck the skinny one and make the fat one watch.”
“You’re right, Freedom. I fuck the skinny one and make the fat one watch.”
23
I told Lloyd to buy the cheapest straw they had. “Don’t get hay,” I said. “This is for hiding, not feeding.”
“What’s the difference?” he asked.
What’s the difference? A guy moves his hands with deliberation and shines Jesus eyes on people and keeps his mouth shut while others talk nonsense, and pretty soon you attribute wisdom to him. Lloyd had lost true love, he’d survived a multi-year drunk; people who hit the bottom and make it out alive are supposed to come back with insights. Deep knowledge.
Here’s this skinny old man sets himself up as a junkyard guru, and he expects me to emulate his grand sobriety, expects me to trot right along following his vision of the pure life. I’d been thinking about stopping drinking because Mr. Gentle here said I should. Why, I wouldn’t follow George Washington himself if he didn’t know the difference between straw and hay.
“Pick up another half-pint,” I said. “I’m out.”
***
I couldn’t go back in the house. I’m used to being the one dirty thing in an otherwise wholesome environment—not counting Dothan—but in that house the environment itself was putrid. Crabs in the couch. Drugs in the toilet. Women who regarded sex with less romanticism than even I did. Heck, I’d never been in a scene where I was the health nut.
Depressing thought. So, I stayed outdoors, where, except for an occasional tinge of marijuana, the air gave the illusion of cleanliness. I sat on the front porch, draining Dustin and watching Marcella urge her son to come in the ambulance before they turned him into a junkie. She was so distraught, strands of hair popped from her bun. Marcella was the sort of woman who used a cookbook featuring quick meals you can make with canned mushroom soup.
When Lloyd started Moby Dick, Andrew ambled on over, ignoring his mother, making sure the hippies knew that leaving them was his idea, not connected to that hysterical woman with the crow voice who wouldn’t take a step outside. The instant he came within reach Marcella grabbed him, and as she jerked him through the open side door, the Ohm Ohm man came to life.
He shouted in the voice of prepuberty, “Tell the boy that I who am one love him, I have always loved the boy and shall always love him across the passages of dimension and space.”
Marcella’s face looked as if she’d received a death threat.
Lloyd had to back up twice to get turned around and gone without running over Owsley—not a simple deal considering the Dick’s gearbox. Owsley was just the kind of kid who wouldn’t move, and Lloyd was just the kind of guy who wouldn’t ask him to. It felt kind of weird watching Lloyd drive away, leaving me alone in the sloth zone. Another abandonment. My days had been a series of abandonments: Sam Callahan, Shannon, Auburn. Dad.
A half block away Lloyd turned on Moby Dick’s lights. One of the rear lights on the trailer was way dimmer than the other one. Not dead yet, but dying.
Dad had majored in art in college, after World War II and before I was born. He never let me see his work, so I have no idea if he was any good, but he had definite opinions of good art and trash. He thought Andy Warhol soup can art was trash. Impressionism was guys painting with their glasses off. He would have liked Owsley’s stuff because he liked animals with lots of details. Details were big with Dad.
While the eagle legs would have pissed Dad off to no end, maybe it wasn’t all Owsley’s fault, maybe Oklahoma didn’t even have eagles. Owsley had probably never seen one—golden or bald. He was drawing a picture of a picture he’d seen somewhere, a dollar bill, maybe. The dollar-bill eagle has toes the size of its head and legs spread like a woman screaming “Nail me, baby! I want a big hot one!”
Dad said you couldn’t draw nature secondhand, you had to look at it and concentrate on seeing what you’re looking at. When I was a little girl and sober I used to study nature so closely. I spent hours lying on my belly next to Miner Creek—almost the exact spot and position of my botched suicide—inspecting each hair on the leg of a spider or each vein in the face of a leaf. One summer I added seventeen sparrows and juncos to my life list. How many alcoholics can tell the difference between a rufous-crowned and a tree sparrow? Answer me that. Somewhere along the way I’d lost my life list, probably left it in a box over at Mom’s.
The screen door slammed and Critter settled in next to me on the porch steps. She held a mug in each hand. “You want coffee? I made a pot and figured you might be in the mood after driving all that ways.”
“I thought hippies only drink chamomile or jasmine or some other good-karma Kool-Aid.”
“Heck, this is Oklahoma, can’t get away from coffee in Oklahoma. Coffee and football.”
I looked at the barefoot, directionless children on the lawn. “This bunch follows football?”
Critter laughed that unguarded giggle of hers that turned guarded around Freedom. “You should see them in the fall. When OU makes a touchdown half jump up and cheer and the other half who were nodding out say ‘What happened? Did we score? Who’s got the ball?’”
The coffee was hot and pure, just the ticket after sucking Dustin dry. “Critter, I hate to tell you, but this is not a healthy place to live.”
She made a sigh noise, as if one of those lower levels agreed. “It’s my home,” she said.
“For one thing, that boyfriend of yours is an A number one jerk. There’s no excuse for nailing the Dog Sniffer bimbo.”
“Whiffer.”
“Whatever.”
As the lawn darkened, the horseshoe game seemed to move farther away. A couple of fireflies expressed sexual desire by lighting their asses over by Owsley. Fireflies are rare in GroVont; we have them, but for the most part they stay unlit.
“I didn’t think you were the type to make value judgments,” Critter said.
“This is a special case. Freedom is a villain, and I’m the expert when it comes to sleeping with villains.”
“He’s my man.”
“There is nothing you can do to make it come out right.”
She blew across her coffee but didn’t drink. “Freedom’s under a lot of pressure, these people de
pend on him.”
“When a man says he’s ‘under a lot of pressure’ it means he’s given himself license to nail anyone he damn well pleases. I was under pressure, you didn’t see me fucking the neighborhood.”
“Freedom says jealousy is middle-class Puritanism repressing the full joy of life.”
Men must learn these lines from a secret book. How else could they all come up with the same garbage? “Critter, listen to me. I’m twenty-two and more experienced.”
I swear to God she said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Finding the full joy of life by rampant and random coupling is for males only. They demand their women find full joy through exclusive service to one cock.” Jesus, I was starting to sound like one of Shane’s bra burners.
Critter’s voice caught an edge. “Freedom doesn’t care who I sleep with.”
“That’s even worse.”
***
The first time I knew for certain Dothan was playing both sides of the fence I was eight months pregnant with Auburn. Eight and three-quarter months. I’d suspected before when he came home from the real estate office with a sunburned butt, but he said I was being a silly, neurotic woman.
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Dothan said.
He lied to his boss, his clients, his parents, and his friends—I thought I was different. I gained thirty pounds that last couple of months and sex wasn’t fun, it hurt, but old Dothan had his needs. They all have their needs. He said my being pregnant put him under pressure—hell, I was the one couldn’t sit, stand, or lie down, what’s he talking pressure for—and if I couldn’t fuck, it was my wifely duty to suck him off.
So the beached walrus dropped to her knees. Three days before Auburn was born I’m down there uncomfortable and bored, and I open my eyes on this blond hair, about a foot long, weaving its way in and around the curly Alabama pubes. Maybe it was Sugar Cannelioski’s hair, I don’t know. One end was black, which meant the color came from a bottle.
I stared at the blond hair and thought, Jesus, what do I do now, then Dothan grabbed both my ears, wrenched them, and squirted pus down my throat. Tasted like dirty dishwater.
He said, “Thanks, babe,” and walked into the kitchen for a beer. Didn’t even help me stand up.
“How can he keep drawing in the dark?” Critter said, nodding at Owsley’s shadowy form.
Another shadowy form detached itself from the horseshoe game and came over to the porch. It was a guy maybe a year or so older than most of the others, with imperfect skin and pitch-black hair pulled back in a long braid. Probably a percentage Indian, or possibly Italian; some percentage of him was swarthy, anyway.
“Hey, Roy,” Critter said.
“Hi, Critter.”
“Roy, meet Maurey, she’s an alcoholic.”
Roy didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at Critter, either, but not looking at her was on purpose, whereas he didn’t look at me because I didn’t count.
“Freedom came back from Dallas with bad vibes,” Roy said.
“You can say that again.”
“He really needed an opiate to mellow out, and I had some Dilaudid, so we made a trade.”
Critter didn’t say anything. A half-moon came up almost straight east, or what I thought was straight east, and a night bird sang from one of the pecan trees. You could tell Roy was embarrassed yet determined to plow ahead.
“Freedom traded a blow job for the Dilaudid.”
“A blow job?” Critter said.
“From you. He said you wouldn’t mind.”
She stood up too quick and spilled coffee on the step. “He traded me for drugs?”
“Freedom do that often?” I asked.
“He’s never…I don’t understand. He doesn’t own my blow jobs, how can he give them away?”
Roy looked at the porch steps and shrugged.
Critter’s voice jumped a note. “We’ll see about this crap. That asshole traded me for drugs. Roy, the Red River’ll freeze before I ever touch your balls.” She took off across the yard. “Freedom!”
Roy stood right where she left him, staring at the porch with his hands in his pockets.
I said, “Don’t you feel like the scum of the earth?”
He did the shrug thing again. “I paid twenty dollars for the Dilaudid.”
An argument broke out across the yard. I couldn’t hear the exact words, but you know how arguments are, exact words don’t mean much. It’s tone that counts. From the sound, Freedom was walking away from her and she was trying to force him to listen.
The question I’ve never given myself an honest answer to is this: Why didn’t I cut off Dothan’s dick and stuff it up his ass? Or to be somewhat less dramatic: Why didn’t I leave the bastard?
The easy answers are lies. I was eight months pregnant, and all my energy was going into my body with none left over for a crisis. I had no money or job skills. I hadn’t let him nail me in a month, and a man left without sex for a month has a right to get it where he can—that would be the one he told himself. I’d known he was low class when I married him, so I was getting what I deserved.
Why is it when women get cheated on, or left behind, or raped, or even cancer, a tiny voice somewhere beneath the intellectual, together woman whispers, You deserved it, sweetie?
Lying fucking voice.
“I’m so bad I deserve bad stuff.” Nobody deserves bad stuff—not drunks, not sluts, not women who marry for something other than love.
Or maybe it’s not women, maybe it’s only me; I’m the only one in the world who thinks, My husband cheats and it’s my fault because I’m pregnant and ugly.
Who the hell got me pregnant and ugly?
Critter rematerialized from the dusk. She had bad posture and was crying, one cheek was shiny pink from where he’d hit her. We were three people who would have died rather than make eye contact.
“Come on,” she said to Roy.
“Should we get high first?”
“Let’s get it over with.”
He gave the shrug again. If Roy ever came close to normalcy, got married, got a job, that shrug would irritate his wife to an early divorce. It was a false pretense at innocence—“My asshole behavior is out of my control. Don’t blame me.”
I said, “Critter, this is crazy. Nobody can turn another person’s sexual performance into a credit card.”
“Freedom can,” Roy said.
“He’s a pimp forcing you to whore for him. Do you really want to be a whore?”
She touched her sore cheek. “I don’t have choices.”
“Everybody has choices. Come away with us in the ambulance, there’s always room for one more. I don’t care if he is your man or how much you love him, if he gets away with this, he’ll never love you.”
A tear ran down the bridge of her nose and hung off the tip. She was lost and seventeen, only a few years older than my daughter. “You didn’t want me. You said I was a statutory teenybopper and shouldn’t be allowed to come along.”
“Heck, Critter, I was just hung over and mad at Shane. All of us in Moby Dick are in trouble, and when people in trouble travel together they have to take care of each other.”
“Where would I go?”
“A person whose house is on fire doesn’t sit in the flames whining ‘Where do I go? Where do I go?’ She gets the fuck out. And honey, your house is on fire.”
She bit her lower lip and looked from me to Roy, who was no help, then back to me. “I’m stuck,” she said. “I can’t run away from Freedom.”
“Sure you can. Everyone in trouble thinks they’re stuck, but no one really is, no one out of jail, anyway.”
“This is jail.”
“No, it’s not, Critter. It’s a bunch of sad people wasting their time.”
Roy said, “You’re taking all the fun out of this. It’s only a
blow job.”
Critter reached over and touched my arm, first time I’ve ever felt natural touching another woman. She said, “I can’t leave Freedom.”
“Why not?”
“He needs me.”
She led Roy into the house.
24
The day John Kennedy got killed, Dothan Talbot beat me up. Technically, I threw the first punch, but I maintain to this moment that Dothan had it coming. After we heard the news, Dothan and that idiot sister of his raced around the playground taunting the way kids will who have been raised by redneck ignoramuses from Alabama.
I wasn’t in the mood. So I decked him.
American folklore considers it quaint when a thirteen-year-old girl hits a boy, he hits back, then they go steady. By Critter’s age, at seventeen, the same scenario is sick. Boys who hit their girlfriends are abusive apes, and girls who stay with boyfriends who hit are spineless chickens.
Dothan never hit me again. After I got old enough to realize the humiliation of violence I always swore that if he ever laid a hand on me I’d be out the door, but that’s one of those blank declarations almost every woman makes while the situation rests in theory. I’m done with blank declarations. Like the death of a father, or alcohol addiction, no one knows for certain how they’ll behave when reality rears up and blows theory to the wind.
Critter, obviously, had given herself an excuse to stay. I’d created an excuse for Dothan to make the decision for us.
We, Critter and I, were supposed to be the vanguard of the first generation of smart women. I was the Be-Here-Now chick of the sixties, she the free-soaring spirit of the seventies, yet neither of us did squat about our cheating, controlling men. It took Marcella, the Betty Crocker of the fifties, to stand erect and shout, “Fuck you, jerk, I’m outta here.”
Or whatever was the cookies-and-milk equivalent of “Fuck you, jerk” in Amarillo, Texas. Maybe she called him a lout.
