Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  What I should have done first is put on my boxer shorts because the Chinese gentleman I spoke with fired me and I don’t handle adversity well naked. Who does? A person would have to maintain an almost egomaniacal self-image not to be affected when he’s standing naked and sick with a clock hanging off his head while a short foreigner fires him from the scummiest job on earth. The man said he’d been waiting for an excuse to get rid of me. He said the kitchen crew refused to work any longer with a spook who argues with himself in funny voices and slow-motion fistfights the dishmachine. That was his exact word for me—spook. Maybe it means something different in Chinese.

  Midway through the conversation, the green, stuffed thing unexpectedly came back up. I returned as soon as possible, but the phone line was dead. I found my boxers and put them on and sat, watching Guiding Light and feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t hold a job I didn’t want anyway. I’ve never been good at doing things I don’t want to do. Soon the room stopped lurching and I staggered downstairs to see if Ann could cut the alarm clock out of my hair.

  • • •

  My firing brought a quick end to the separate apartments debate before it even began. The Guaranteed Student Loan wouldn’t pay off until school started in mid-September, two weeks after rent was due. Moving in with a woman out of economic distress is generally a major error, but, in this case, I probably would have taken the plunge anyway—eventually. Besides, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice.

  We boxed up the books, plants, TV, underwear, and posters of famous (dead) writers, carted the load downstairs, and stuffed it into two vacant baby beds. Ann was tickled pink.

  “It was all on purpose, you know.”

  “What was on purpose?”

  “I got you drunk and seduced you on your birthday just so you’d oversleep and lose your job and move in with Buggie and me.”

  “Seduce means to persuade somebody to do something they don’t want to do. I’ve never been seduced in my life.”

  “Well, I did it on purpose anyway. I want you stuck with us forever.”

  I have to doubt that Ann got me drunk so she could get me fired. Ann was incapable of harboring an ulterior motive.

  Before I lost the dishwashing job, I didn’t realize the amazing amount of difference between living with a woman and staying with her every night. Bathroom privileges, for instance, or the fact that Exercise with Jeanie came on opposite Andy Griffith. Or dishes. Whenever I washed the dishes before my books moved downstairs, I was rewarded with deep appreciation and love. Suddenly I was expected to do my part. No more “Oh, Loren, you’re so sweet, you don’t have to clean up this mess.” Instead, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and every other Sunday, she flopped on the couch with Buggie and said, “Your turn, pal.” Same with laundry, trash, and dirty diapers.

  Even worse, I lost my safety valve. When Buggie decided he hated everyone and everything, or when Ann played her Rod McKuen albums about the earth and the sky, or when I simply felt like being by myself for a while, I could no longer say, “See you later, honey,” and go home. I considered taking up smoking so I could run out to the 7-Eleven once a day, but that idea seemed stupid even for me.

  Another thing—a person who lives alone for many years tends to develop disgusting habits. Thoughtless nose probing, for example. Talking to myself at meals, leaving notebooks and socks wherever they drop, drinking straight from the milk carton, leaving the toilet seat up, scratching whenever and whatever itched. Overnight I had to start watching myself. I hate watching myself.

  • • •

  Another main difference between living alone and living with a woman and her child is that you’re forced to pay attention to holidays. Holidays are a time set aside for feeling secure and smug, and they tend to be depressing if you aren’t. Secure and smug. The year before Ann, my junior year at DU, I beat the holiday manics by reading The Grapes of Wrath clear through Thanksgiving weekend. Christmas—the biggie—I settled into bed with a family-size bag of Doritos and a notebook and spent the day listing 101 offbeat ways a person can get himself killed. Easter was easier. Good Friday I ate a half ounce of psychedelic cacti and dry-heaved from the Passion to the Resurrection.

  But people with children actually look forward to the holiday season, at least they pretend to. They use holidays to mark the passage of time, bring out the cameras, record growth. Holidays become bribes: “No bubble blower now, maybe if you’re a good boy Santa will bring you one,” or deadlines: “If this kid isn’t out of diapers by Labor Day I’ll scream.” When a couple gets old, they fondly look back on the Easter Dobie wet his pants in church or the summer vacation they packed four kids and two dogs into the station wagon and drove to Knott’s Berry Farm.

  I can’t really say what it felt like or what I thought about on a day-to-day basis that first year. The routines are fuzzy, but each holiday is stored on tape somewhere in my cerebral cortex to be replayed whenever the nostalgia impulse overcomes common sense.

  There’s Halloween. I dressed up as Aunt Jemima, black face, boobs, the works. Buggie took one look and cried for three hours. Thanksgiving we ate fresh pineapple and trout a la Hemingway for breakfast, then drove down to Colorado Springs to visit Garden of the Gods Park. Buggie said a five-word sentence and that night Ann and I made love on the couch while Casablanca played on the Channel 11 holiday movie.

  Buggie was still too young to understand Santa Claus theory—the strange fat man who brought free stuff in the night—but he liked to open boxes. Ann individually wrapped all kinds of stocking stuffers, and Christmas morning while we sat on the couch, warming our hands around mugs of hot coffee and rum, Buggie tore through package after package. Colored felt-tip pens, tiny race cars, bags of gummy bears, pop-up books, a pretend telephone that rang when you twisted the dial—Buggie pulled each one out of its colored paper, glanced at it a moment, then tossed the present toward us, the paper toward the tree, and moved on to another box.

  “He’d be just as happy if I’d wrapped forty empty boxes,” Ann said.

  I leaned back, faked a yawn, and slid my arm around Ann. The feeling of family was almost spine-tingling. Why hadn’t anyone ever told me what Christmas morning with a loving woman and a young child would be like? I’d have run off and married at fourteen.

  Ann shifted into my arm. “I hope he likes the turtle.” She’d spent weeks choosing between a stuffed giraffe and a cow, and, as the stores closed Christmas Eve, ditched both for a giant green turtle with half-closed eyelids and a striped baseball cap that I objected to on the grounds of unrealism. A turtle can’t pull a baseball cap into its shell.

  “I bet he loves it.”

  “You always bet he loves anything, Loren. Do you realize how important presents are at his age? That turtle could affect Buggie’s whole life?”

  My present for Buggie was a twelve-volume set of O. Henry short stories that I’d found at a yard sale across from campus. The plan was to read Buggie one story every night at bedtime—all 241 of them over and over—until he was old enough to read by himself. I thought an O. Henry story a night for several years would affect Buggie’s later life more than a turtle with a baseball cap, but Ann had been so proud when she brought the turtle home from the Target Store that I didn’t say what I thought.

  Buggie’s present-opening method was more or less unique to my experience. He didn’t tear on the ends or seams. Instead, he clawed right at the middle of the package until he’d gouged a hole, then he ripped the wrapping paper into strips. The floor looked like refuse from a New York City ticker tape parade before he finally dug his way into the next-to-last box and pulled the turtle out by one of its ears. He sat back, staring at the turtle seriously.

  “I didn’t know turtles have ears,” Ann said.

  “I didn’t know they have baseball caps.”

  “Eekle,” Buggie said.

  Ann laughed, warm and at home. “No,
it’s a turtle. Turtle like in the rabbit and turtle story.”

  Buggie looked over at us. “Eekle.”

  Ann set down her coffee mug and leaned forward. I could tell she was pleased with Buggie’s reaction to the turtle. At least he hadn’t thrown it into the pile and gone on to the next unwrapping job. “What should we name him?” she asked.

  Buggie held the turtle to his chest, “Hawiet.”

  “Harriet,” I said. “That’s a girl’s name. Why would you name a boy turtle a girl’s name?”

  “He can name her anything he likes.”

  “Hawiet.”

  While Buggie crawled toward the big O. Henry package, Ann took our cups to the kitchen for more coffee and rum. I watched Buggie drag Harriet around the big box, muttering to her or him, whatever the turtle was, in some language that runs between babies and stuffed animals. I couldn’t help but wonder if my mom felt this together-with-a-spot-in-the-world glow on my second Christmas. Or Garret’s. Or Patrick’s. It seemed impossible not to feel worthwhile and loving under these conditions, but if Mom had felt something good then, I wondered what happened later. Could the same thing ever happen between Buggie and Ann that had happened between my mom and me? Or Ann and her dad? This was a depressing line of wondering. How could something so simple as a parent’s love for a child get so complicated? The worst things in life are always the best things gone bad.

  “Here,” Ann said. She handed me a package.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your present, silly.”

  “What is it?”

  “Open it and find out.” I daresay those five lines were being repeated in six million homes across America at that very instant. There’s something nice about tradition. It doesn’t have to be original.

  I held off on my gift a few minutes, savoring the feeling. Besides, Buggie was on the edge of discovering literature. He tore straight through the top of the paper, completely unwrapping the box before lifting the top flap. Then he reached in and right-hand-threw the first book at the television. The second was left-handed into the tree. Once all the books lay scattered around on the floor, Buggie tipped the box sideways and crawled in. He sat in the box, holding Harriet by a flipper and looking out at us with those melting panda bear eyes. I could have cried from love.

  Ann sighed. “Oh, look, don’t you wish we had a camera.”

  I smiled because deep in my sock crib was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic I hadn’t had time to wrap. “Maybe Santa will bring one next year,” I said.

  “Next year he’ll be too big.”

  “For what?”

  Ann’s present to me was a pair of woollysock slippers with leather soles and a red monkey head on the front. While Ann looked proud, I kicked off my flip-flops and tried them on. They felt real comfortable and warm, but I wasn’t completely happy about the monkey heads.

  I hugged Ann. “Thanks, darlin’.”

  “Loren, this is the best Christmas of my life.”

  We kissed a long time until I started to get excited and slid a hand down to her breast. Ann had very sensitive breasts, I guess because she’d nursed Buggie for so long. I could almost always get her wet by touching her breasts.

  “Maybe we ought to go back to bed while he plays with his toys,” I murmured.

  Before Ann could answer, Buggie took off up the Christmas tree. I heard a sound like a pop and opened my eyes in time to glimpse a shaking tree; then it fell, breaking bulbs, shorting out lights, knocking a philodendron into the turntable, crashing both to the floor. I jumped the end table and waded into the mess, knee-deep in branches, pine needles, and wrapping paper. I couldn’t find Buggie. I couldn’t hear Buggie. He should have been screaming his little head off, but, when I froze for a moment, I couldn’t hear a thing.

  Ann was on her knees beside me, digging through the branches, her eyes jittering around, all whites like a wild horse when it’s scared. I jumped from the pile and lifted the whole tree up by the four-legged base. Buggie lay on his back, covered with needles, looking up at us with that expression on his face. That Buggie’s-been-betrayed-again expression.

  Ann scooped him up and hugged and cried and ran around the room until Buggie got the idea and started crying also. He looked okay to me, just a little surprised. I think Ann’s carrying on affected him more than the fall. Ann circled the room three or four times, too worked up to settle in one spot. Finally she stopped and glared at me. “Don’t you ever kiss me in front of Buggie again.”

  That seemed like an odd thing to say. “You think Buggie climbed the tree because we were kissing?”

  “Why else? Every time I start to feel good, something bad happens. I’m not going to feel good anymore.”

  “Ann, that’s not rational.”

  “Who says I’m supposed to be rational?”

  All day, Ann concentrated on feeling as depressed as possible so nothing bad would happen to us. She didn’t even perk up when I gave her the unwrapped camera. To watch her fussing around the apartment, roaming from place to place, yet never letting Buggie leave her sight, you’d think this wasn’t Christmas and we weren’t all together.

  • • •

  Maybe her “act the opposite of how you feel” logic worked because the day before New Year’s Eve, something good happened. We found a two-bedroom duplex on the same block as Ann’s day-care center. The duplex was blue with a big fenced-in backyard, a single garage, and a private patio next to a rock garden with some prickly plants that weren’t dead. Ann and I talked in plurals about the duplex. Our bathroom. Our broken oven. We should find a set of chairs for our kitchen. For the first time, I didn’t feel as if I was living in someone else’s place.

  Ann had been poor for so long, she’d become a real pro at secondhand-store shopping. Not that I hadn’t been poor as long as Ann, it’s just that I don’t have standards when it comes to my surroundings. A foam rubber pad on the floor and a phone company cable spool were good enough for me. I never had the patience for the secondhand circuit.

  Ann had plenty of patience for both of us. We made all the rounds; found a beautiful iron bed frame at the Salvation Army, an overstuffed rocker and love seat at the St. Vincent de Paul Store, a firm mattress and springs at a garage sale in Aurora, and best of all, two long chests of drawers with most of the paint and some of the knobs still like new. No more baby bed storage.

  “We can get rid of the cribs now,” I said, though I should have known better. No woman has fourteen places for babies to sleep unless she wants them.

  Tears formed. “I like my cribs. Some of these have been with me since the Divine Light. Look, see this spot? Buggie knocked a tooth out right there, and Joyce gave me that one on Thamu Kamala’s third birthday. Jesse swallowed a peach pit and almost died in that one. I saved him. How could I throw out the crib Jesse was in when I saved his life?”

  “We don’t need them anymore.”

  “We don’t need your desk either.”

  Ann and I compromised. We carried all the various bits of baby paraphernalia out to the garage except for three especially meaningful pieces. I had a hell of a time getting them all in, had to pile the frames and little mattresses two deep, baby beds on bottom, cribs, cradles, and bassinets on top. You’d think Ann was having her cat put to sleep. She said bye-bye to each piece.

  “The beds will still be here when you need them.”

  “It’s not the same, Loren.”

  I shut the garage door and, so far as I know, neither one of us saw those cribs again for four years.

  She shouldn’t have threatened my desk. It was a beautiful desk I found sitting next to a Goodwill Industries dumpster in the Cinderella City parking lot. Like to never fit it in the backseat of my car. My desk was a slightly larger version of the one I sat behind in the second grade—chair welded permanently to the desk legs, pen trough on the far side of the sloping top. The lid fla
pped open so if I wanted anything from inside, I had to clear the top and stack all my papers and typewriter on the floor.

  I loved that desk. Loved typing at a fifteen-degree angle and doodling Charlie Brown pictures on the wood. For authenticity, I ruined a steak knife carving and on my chair, so when I typed a long time and stood up, you could read LOREN LOVES ANN and SENIORS ’68 on my butt—if you could see my butt.

  The desk didn’t see much use that spring, though. I finished the Western in October, and by January, schoolwork had lost its charm. This was the last semester of my senior year and all my classes were required subjects I’d been avoiding since high school. Geometry. Botany. Ethics. What does an English major need with ethics? Even my English classes bored me silly. “Jonathan Yardley’s Place in the History of Literary Criticism” and “Major Colorado Poets.” Like any writer, in fact like anybody I’ve ever met, including critics, I think the literary critic belongs in the same category as the blowfly. And Jonathan Yardley is to literary criticism what belladonna is to the dry mouth. As to “Major Colorado Poets,” the quality drops off dramatically after Peter Pym, the Western Shakespeare.

  My New Year’s resolution was to survive the semester and graduate. Within a couple of weeks, I realized I’d set my sights too high and modified the goal to survival until Easter vacation. By Lincoln’s birthday it was survive until Friday afternoon. The ethics class was the worst. Ethics must be my tragic deficiency.

  • • •

  Spring break we drove across Idaho to visit Ernest Hemingway. Ann wanted to see Zion National Park, but I had something important to discuss and Hemingway was the closest dead writer of major magnitude. I promised her Zion in the summer, a false promise because events came up that summer and Ann never made it to Zion. I feel kind of bad about that.