by Tim Sandlin
As I finished the comb-out, Lloyd came back for Moby Dick. “I got a tank of gas and some groceries, but I’ll need another six-pack. We’re out of Yukon Jack territory, Maurey. Southern Comfort’s almost the same stuff.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“One, maybe one-thirty.”
“I missed Paul Harvey. My life is in shambles. I missed Paul Harvey and we’re trapped in a hell-hole where they don’t sell Yukon Jack.”
“I told you she’d fall apart in the South,” Shane said.
“Janis Joplin drank Southern Comfort. She was hard core and she died. Make mine tequila.”
Shane made a drooling snort sound. “If you drink tequila, you’ll be hard core and die, too.”
Lloyd hoisted himself into the driver’s seat. “What’re you doing to the boy?”
“Maurey’s playing Samson and Delilah,” Shane said.
Lloyd watched a few moments. “Don’t cut his ears off. He’ll bleed in the ambulance.”
Sam Callahan says the two times men invariably make cornball comments is when they’re watching someone get a haircut or watching someone change a tire. You ask me, there’s more than two cases.
***
I started by forming a ponytail with my left fist and cutting straight across. Was the first ponytail I ever saw long as a pony’s tail. Shane’s scissors were little dudes he used to cut tape for his urine system, so mine wasn’t an efficient beauty shop operation. My snips had the subtlety of a machete hack across Guatemala. But a weird thing happened as the scissors clipped their way through the ponytail. The world surrounding Owsley and me shut down, went blurry. Everything focused into one cone of light where my hands intersected his hair.
There’s a trance state that two beings can reach where the silly banter of nearby yahoos no longer exists. Time no longer exists. Nothing before, after, or around the immediate unity of the two matters. It’s neat.
Frostbite and I achieved the trance in an arena filled with several thousand people dressed in western wear. I pulled it off while nursing both my babies, and once an old sheepherder and I found it dancing “The Tennessee Waltz” at a Fourth of July street party in Tensleep.
The moment you’re supposed to transcend the reality of time and space is sex, but that’s one area where I’ve never come close. Sex is complex—Will my birth control kick in? Why won’t he slow down? Will he treat me like dogshit in the morning? The relationship works with horse and rider, mother and child, or two dancers who become one with the music and thus with each other. First time you start wondering who’ll finish on top, the deal is blown.
“Why didn’t you want Andrew to call you Owsley?”
“Freedom gave everyone stupid names, said a new identity would force a break from our hung-up pasts. He’s the one with the hung-up past.”
The hair between my fingers was clean mountain water; sunlight on the Tetons in winter; awakening at dawn and lying in bed listening to the birds.
“So where’d he come up with Owsley?”
“Owsley’s the guy in California who makes LSD. Freedom wanted me to become a chemist. He said nobody gets high on art.”
The scissors were a silver canoe gliding through a golden lake. All these metaphors made my clitoris throb.
“Do you have a real name?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“Why would I laugh?”
“Brad.”
“Brad?”
“I knew you would laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. Do you hear laughing?” What he heard was me gasping for air. “Okay. Owsley is dead. Out of the fallen hair will arise Brad. The normal boy.”
“Will cutting my hair and saying I’m normal make me normal, Mrs. Talbot?”
“Sure. While we’re taking new identities, call me Miss Pierce from now on. I’m done with Talbot.”
“We’ll be Brad and Miss Pierce.”
By God if I didn’t have an orgasm. Not your everyday gee-that’s-nice orgasm, either. There’s “I got off, dear. You can stop now,” and then there’s orgasm. Orgasm is when your eyes and ears ring. Orgasm is when you can still feel it hours later in the back of your knees.
“Are you done, Miss Pierce?”
“Yeah, let’s find a mirror.”
29
Marcella changed Hugo Jr. down by the creek where she could watch Andrew wade up and down promoting leaf races in the slow current. Owsley, now Brad, found a Safeway sack in the trash can for his shorn hair. I asked him what he planned to do with it.
“I might stuff it in a box and mail it to Freedom.”
“You think he would understand the symbolism?”
Shane peeled off a toenail, put it in his mouth, then spit it on the ground. “In 1964, my hair was long as Brad’s, before you chopped it off. That’s when I was on the bus with Ken Kesey.”
I went off to the park ladies’ room to pee and wipe my upper leg—not all that stuff you feel afterward is boy goo. I didn’t think Shane had noticed my Big O during the haircut. He wasn’t the type to witness an orgasm and not comment on it.
The women’s outhouse shared a wall with the men’s outhouse, and some nitwit had drilled quarter-size peepholes the women stuffed with wads of toilet paper. I imagined an ongoing battle of unplugging and plugging. This game must be an Arkansas thing; Wyoming men have the class and style of a McDonald’s burger, but at least they don’t cop their thrills watching women piss.
The graffiti read Marilyn Monroe had a Mastectomy. You tell me what that’s supposed to mean.
When I returned, Shane was waving his wicked little toenail knife like a conductor on a baton. “Due to an outbreak of lice in the trenches, burr haircuts were ordered for all soldiers in World War One. One French division mutinied and marched en masse to the bordellos of Marseilles.”
Brad interrupted the lecture. “Is your name really Shane?”
“Of course my name is Shane. Shane is an ancient, venerated praenomen of my forebears, on the matrilineal side. There were Shanes among the earliest Rinesfoos in thirteenth-century Belgium.”
I thought about pointing out his matrilineal side would hardly have been named Rinesfoos but skipped it. He’d have claimed twenty-six generations of virgin birth. “Five or six Shanes live around Jackson Hole, but none of them are older than the movie. I think you stole the name from Alan Ladd.”
“As a matter of fact, princess, the man who wrote Shane took the name from me. We had adjoining lockers on the UCLA football team.”
“Let’s ask Marcella. I’ll bet cash your name is Percival or Mordecai, something wimpy and embarrassing.”
Shane’s head bobbed up and down, with his chins floating slightly after the action. He raised up on his hands and took on the radish tinge.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Ask her.”
That’s when Andrew screamed, which was nothing new, only his scream was followed by one from Marcella. “Snake!”
Lord knows what I thought I was doing, but I grabbed the scissors and ran down to the creek. Marcella, with Hugo Jr. clutched to her chest, pointed at the snake between us and Andrew. Long sucker with black bands and yellow spots. Slit tongue zipping in and out. Slithery movements. Andrew stood in shin-deep water, pooping his pants.
With a yell, I jumped on the snake and got his neck in a death grip, just like the guy on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The snake twisted and jerked, fighting to sink his fangs in my skin. Screaming the Blackfoot war cry, I straddled him and held his head at crotch level while his body writhed between my legs. Then I squeezed him with my left hand, plunged the scissors into his neck, and started cutting.
Yellow gunk flowed, then muscles popped out the slit—actually went faster than Brad’s hair. After I cut through the spine I tore his head off and with one last shriek threw it as far as I could.
The onl
y sound was Andrew whimpering in front of me. I turned back to find Marcella, Brad, and Shane staring like I was the mad serial killer of Tasmania.
“It was just a harmless king snake,” Shane said.
Marcella ran over and pulled Andrew from the creek. She swatted him once on the rear, then hugged him until he recovered enough to burst into violent tears.
Brad was in awe. “You ripped his head right off.”
I stared down at the snake’s body, still writhing on the ground beneath my feet. Then I looked up and made eye contact with Shane. I said, “He looked like a big dick. I always wanted to tear the head off a big dick.”
30
“I deserve this drink.”
Lloyd wrestled the shifter rod into second and pulled out on U.S. 270. “You’ve said that same thing each day since we met.”
“I’ve deserved a drink each day since we met.”
“What happens on days you don’t deserve a drink?”
On the edge of town we passed a stockyard jammed to the gills with pigs—Band-Aid-colored snouts and screwy tails as far as the eye could see.
“We raised a hog once,” I said. “Dad named her Dolores Del Rio and she was gross, ate her own shit along with six puppies, a bag of charcoal briquettes, and my school copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. I was never so happy to slaughter anything in my life.”
Lloyd went into third and repeated himself. “What happens on days you don’t deserve a drink?”
“Look. I just killed a snake and lost all my money. My hands are still shaking. If I ever deserved a drink in my life, I deserve this one.”
“I’m not disagreeing. I only wondered what happens on days you don’t deserve to drink.”
“I don’t drink.” I said that before I thought whether it was true or not, but after a few moments’ consideration I decided to believe myself. The last two weeks had been daily trauma—surely I earned my escapism after losing a child and blowing a suicide—and before that life had been so boring and tedious, alcohol made the unbearable barely bearable. Since Dad died the only days I didn’t deserve a drink were the five spent in a coma.
“Deserving drinks is an interesting notion,” Lloyd said.
“If you’re going to lecture, I’ll climb in back where I’m appreciated.”
My tough-broad reputation had risen considerably in the back two-thirds of the ambulance. In an instant, Andrew changed from irritating brat to irritating hero worshiper—following me around the park like a lost lamb, crawling into my lap every time I sat down. He was only partially disenchanted when I refused to wear the dead snake around my neck.
Brad was too cool to actively fawn or anything, but when I twisted around in the passenger’s seat to argue with Shane on the Eve-snake relationship in the Garden of Eden, Brad was bent over his art pad sketching my face.
As usual, Shane pontificated. “Woman has for all time been terrified of the serpent because of the distinct possibility that one could ooze into her womb and nest. It’s an ovarian reaction.”
I said, “Bull. Women are no more afraid of snakes than men. I didn’t see you wheeling down there to save the kid.”
“I knew the snake to be harmless.”
“Maurey didn’t know that,” Marcella said. “What she did was just as heroic as if it was an adder.”
“Oh, my God, an adder,” Shane said with sarcasm. He tried to denigrate my snake battle, but even Shane looked at me a tad differently. He hadn’t called me little missy in over an hour.
When Andrew dropped his Coke it blew foam on Brad’s art work and Marcella’s rayon dress, which caused a scramble. Andrew whined for another Coke while Brad dramatically ripped the soiled page from his pad and Shane explained how the FBI made Coca-Cola take the cocaine out of its secret formula but each year the company whips up a batch of original recipe for its upper-echelon officers and select members of the executive branch of government.
I turned to Lloyd. “Does it feel to you that we’re establishing a pattern here on the road?”
He squinted into the side mirror. “I think we got us a family unit.”
***
Dear Dad,
Here’s what I think. I might pick a date, like three months from today, and that’ll be the day to stop drinking and turn serious. Meantime I can get it out of my system. How does that idea strike you?
I need you now,
Merle Jean Pierce
P.S. I killed a snake.
***
I named the tequila bottle Elvis because Shane had been yammering about him off and on all day, telling bizarre stories in which he saved Elvis’s life or career. Shane claimed to be the entire background chorus on “Blue Christmas.” “I did four tracks of Blue-blue-blues in harmony with myself,” he said. “Elvis said colored girls couldn’t have done better.”
I also named the tequila Elvis because he was the king and I’d killed a king snake, which metaphorically made me the Elvis killer. Personally, I’d never been that hot for his music—too much hips for country, too much Brylcreem for rock ’n’ roll—but it was an okay name for tequila. “Gimme an Elvis, straight up.” “I shoot Elvis with lemon and salt.”
The worst social blunder I ever made in my life—before the Auburn-on-the-roof deal—was made on tequila. You ever do something so embarrassing you relive it over and over when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Something so rotten it affects your self-image from that day on?
Sophomore year at Laramie, I wasn’t ready for a test in Psych 101, so I spent a snowy afternoon sitting in my dorm room staring out the window and doing shots of Cuervo Silver. My roommate, Betsy, was concerned about my welfare, and she convinced me to go downstairs to the cafeteria for supper.
Big mistake. Someone was ribbing Lucy Jane Andrews from Thermopolis about biting a boy’s tongue when he French-kissed her on the first date, and she said, “At least I didn’t get pregnant before puberty.”
The other three girls at the table sniggered and slid their eyes at me. I’d been hearing that crap for six years and learned to roll with it as the price you pay for being different, but this time I cracked. I could blame Cuervo or cafeteria food, but the truth is no one is responsible for this gig but me.
“Lucy Jane,” I said too loudly, “had an accident in her white linen skirt a few years back and now she wears tampons every single day and every single night of the month. She hasn’t been out of the bathroom without a plug in since she left high school.”
Polly St. Michel tittered. I turned on her. “What are you laughing at? Your stepbrother raped you when you were twelve and now you can’t ever have a baby.” I turned on everybody at once. “You cat women are always gossiping about my daughter. Well, at least I’m honest, I don’t hide ugly little secrets.”
Betsy defended herself. “We don’t all hide ugly secrets.”
“Who’ll go upstairs in fifteen minutes and make herself vomit like she does after every meal?” The cafeteria got real quiet as I fired my final shot at Dory Crandall. The poor girl had never been anything but kind to me. One midnight she told me her secret because the guilt was driving her to meekness. “And who slept with her best friend’s boyfriend the day before they got married? I’ll bet the happy bride would love to know that one.”
Only when I paused for breath and looked in their faces did I realize I’d gone too far. All my female friendships were dead meat. Even others who weren’t at the table would never trust me now, for good reason. In cowboy terms, I’d shot myself in the foot. In the head.
“Tell me about your dad,” Lloyd said.
“What?”
“You write him postcards every day, but he’s dead.”
“Who told you my father is dead?”
“You did, yesterday when the highway patrolman stopped us. Don’t you remember?” Don’t you remember? Always digging at m
e; sometimes I wished Lloyd were more like Shane. Shane didn’t care whether I drank myself to death or not.
A picture of Buddy formed in my mind—six four, black bush of a beard, voice that reverberated with authority. “Dad was like what you think of as God.”
Lloyd kept his Jesus eyes on the road. “What’s that mean?”
I thought in terms of honesty. What are God’s characteristics? “Remote. Perfect, yet remote. God knows everything you do, but nothing you do affects him one way or the other.”
“Your God must not be Southern Baptist.”
“The county only decided to plow the ranch road a couple years ago, so back when I started school Mom and Petey and I lived in town all winter while Dad stayed on the mountain. I didn’t see him on a day-to-day basis.”
“It’s tricky loving someone you don’t see. They tend to get built into dream people.” I guess Lloyd was relating my deal to his wife, Sharon.
I two-handed a slug of Elvis. “Mom was petty. She couldn’t stand a cat hair on her curtains, or she’d go berserk if a bee got loose in the car. She spent hours worrying about the characters on a soap opera.”
“All moms are like that,” Lloyd said.
“But Dad treated her like a fairy princess, even after she started flipping out. He took everything she said seriously.”
“So, do you hate him or her for that?”
“Nothing I did affected him. When the baby was born, he still wouldn’t come out of the mountains. Shannon and I lived at Sam and Lydia’s while Dad took care of the horses.”
I sucked in one hell of a good pull on Elvis. “Dad’s not dead. He’s gone to San Francisco on business.”
Brad was listening in back. He spoke up in the voice of a fourteen-year-old. “My dad used to wake me up at night and make me hide in the bathroom while Mom turned a trick in my bed.”
I said, “Oh.”
31
I tried to get Sam Callahan to write a story about dry mouth once. He could have a character whose mission in life was to develop a drug that didn’t cause next-day ashtray lips.
