Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  The element I hadn’t expected from Kathy was the wash of creative energy. Rose-colored, smoky waves flowed from the casket, pressing me into the wood of the pew. Trapped in her dead body was all the creativity of another Emily Dickinson or Tennessee Williams. Or Agatha Christie. Exploding potential…I couldn’t understand how that much potential could go unrealized. I mean, I understood how—a hollow-point bullet through the spine—but why? Nature, God, blind chance, Whoever is so thriftless. Sitting next to Buggie, I thought, If someone is in charge of this world, He, She, or It doesn’t know His, Her, or Its ass from a hole in the dirt.

  Ann touched my hand. “Don’t think that.”

  Had I spoken? Or was Ann’s intuition getting out of control?

  “It’s time to go,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We have to leave first. Get Buggie’s truck.”

  • • •

  “Didn’t Mom say people from her bar would be there? I didn’t see anyone old enough to work in a bar.”

  “There was an old guy sitting back by himself. That one.” Ann pointed out a small brown man coming through the church door. He walked slowly, like something was the matter with his legs, and a number of teenagers shuffled behind him, trying to get around and out into the sun.

  “He looks like a teacher or school janitor,” I said. “He doesn’t move like someone who works in a bar.” Ann, Buggie, and I waited in the unstarted Chevelle, watching Kathy’s friends and classmates. I balanced my hands on the steering wheel while Ann twisted around to strap Buggie into his safety seat.

  “There, all cozy and secure like a good little Bug,” she cooed. Ann settled back into the front seat. “That was kind of sad. Your sister was very pretty.”

  “I can’t believe this heat. How can people live here?”

  “Was Texas always this hot when you were growing up?”

  “In August. Did you hear that minister, ‘how straight the arrow flies’? I almost got up and said something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, something.”

  Two girls Kathy’s age walked past the Chevelle and got into a Datsun 240Z. One of the girls was very tall and skinny and when she smiled her mouth glittered from braces. As the door shut, I heard laughter. The effects of death were already wearing off.

  “We’re supposed to pull in line after Patrick,” Ann said. “I hope he can drive.”

  “Jennifer’s behind the wheel.” I looked at my hands. “God, it’s hot.” Carloads of Texans swept by on the avenue to our left. Across the street, people moved in and out of a Burger King next to a bowling alley. There wasn’t a dog or bird or cat in sight. In front of the church, one scrawny juniper hung on in a circle of dirt surrounded by concrete sidewalk.

  Ann looked out her side window. “We had a storm at Mama’s funeral. A creek rose and flooded the cemetery, filled up her hole so they had to bring out a sump pump before they buried her. Dad fried a salmon for supper. I rolled up some hush puppies. Larry kept asking when Mama’d be home.”

  “Who’s Larry?”

  “My littlest brother. He was only eight and someone told him Mama went to heaven but he’d see her again real soon. I thought Dad would sock him if he didn’t shut up, but he kept asking and asking, wouldn’t let it go.”

  The hearse pulled out slowly, followed by Mom and Don, then Jennifer and Patrick. “We’re next,” Ann said.

  I looked across the street, thinking about William Faulkner. A little boy coming from the Burger King dropped a white sack and his mother swatted him on the rear. A man in a Buick LeSabre pulled up to the drive-away window. What would William Faulkner make of this, I wondered. That death and Burger King coexist?

  Buggie gurgled, “Foonral.”

  “They’re going without us,” Ann said.

  “Would you mind if we skipped the cemetery?”

  “Go straight back to your mom’s?”

  “Let’s just sit here a minute.”

  Ann reached across and took my hand. That felt nice. I really loved Ann and Buggie. I tried to picture us in South Texas, driving down this busy street, pulling into the Burger King, wearing shorts and T-shirts ten months a year. I could see Texas and I could see us, but the two pictures wouldn’t come together. Those kids at the funeral hadn’t looked like anyone I’d ever seen in Denver. Texas suddenly felt like the wrong place to be.

  I pushed in the clutch. “Let’s leave town,” I said. “I don’t really care to see the family again today.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  The engine kicked on with a rumble, then idled down to quiet. “This is no way to spend a honeymoon. Let’s drive along the coast and up across Mississippi.”

  “Won’t your mom be hurt?”

  She had said one in prison, one drunk, and that son of a bitch. Why was I the son of a bitch? I had a college education and a wife and child. What more could she want?

  “I don’t see how I could hurt her any more than I already have. We’re just starting life. I think we ought to stay away from my relatives awhile.”

  I made a U-turn, heading the opposite direction from Kathy, Mom, and Patrick. Cracking the side vent, I leaned forward so my shirt wouldn’t stick to the car seat. There comes a time, even when it’s closest and most real, when you must say Fuck death. This heavy crap is a bore, and get on with your life. Even if life ends, it’s still out there and has to be somehow handled.

  “Why Mississippi?” Ann asked.

  “I’ve never been there.”

  She smiled. “Which dead writer are we going to happen to be near?”

  “No dead writers. I’d just like to see a swamp for a change. Don’t you ever get tired of the Rockies?”

  • • •

  I told her at supper that night.

  “William Faulkner.”

  “I knew we’d find a dead writer before the honeymoon ended.”

  “We’re not going just to see Faulkner. He’s along the way.”

  Ann laughed like I’d delighted her again. “That’s why I love you, Loren. Only you would think Mississippi is along the way between Texas and Colorado.”

  “That’s a typical thing to say.”

  Ann rolled clam linguini around her fork. “Have you ever read his books?”

  “I started Sound and the Fury once. Faulkner was so creative most people don’t know what he’s talking about.” We ate in a dark place with booths, just across the Louisiana line from Beaumont. I think it was called Neptune’s Cavern. We stopped there because of an old RECOMMENDED BY DUNCAN HINES sign above the door.

  “Do you know what he’s talking about? Buggie, sit up. Loren, pull Buggie up before he falls.” Buggie had managed to slide down between his booster seat and the table. Another six inches and he would drop, conking his head and causing a scene.

  I pulled Buggie upright by his armpits. “I’ll know after I see the grave.” He held a cracker out over the carpet and mashed a fistful of cracker crumbs.

  “How will you know?”

  “He’ll tell me.” I tried to distract Buggie with a french fry, but he turned his head with a “Yish,” and kept crumbling crackers onto the floor.

  “The french fry has ketchup on it,” Ann said. I knew that.

  “Yish,” Buggie said.

  “He won’t eat ketchup anymore.” Buggie’s picky food habits changed by the day. For six months once he lived on macaroni and cheese. Then he switched to a peanut butter and jelly period. Ann came around the table and knelt to brush Buggie’s crumbs from the floor onto her paper napkin.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’ll only take a second. He’s making a mess.” Buggie squeezed another cracker. Some of the crumbs floated into Ann’s long hair.

  I grabbed his hand, “Cool it, Bug. C’mon, Ann, the waitress has a s
pecial cracker tool—a crumb vacuum or something.”

  “She might get mad if she sees what we let him do.”

  “What do you care if the waitress gets mad? She’s paid to put up with kids and we’ll never see her again.”

  Ann looked up from her napkin of bread crumbs. “I just don’t want to make anyone mad.”

  I shut up and ate my fried shrimp. Usually I prefer shrimp sautéed or boiled, but death in the family makes people do things a little differently. I couldn’t get over Mom calling me a son of a bitch. What kind of an attitude is that? Son of a bitch. You’d think I grew up to be a hit man or something.

  Back in her side of the booth, Ann folded the crumby napkin in a square and pressed it into the table next to a box of white and pink sugar packets. “Your mother was angry with you.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I wasn’t comfortable around her. I mean, she broke a window and scared Buggie. My mother never broke a window.”

  “She was angry with everyone. It must be tough, losing a kid like that—even for my mother.”

  Ann knocked on the bottom of the table. “She seemed especially angry with you.”

  “I don’t blame her. Look at the breading on this shrimp, must be a half inch thick. You wade through all this breading to find a tiny little shrimp under there.”

  Ann looked sympathetically at my shrimp. “I don’t see how they get away with that.” It was a small shrimp. “Here, have some linguini.” She shoved her plate across the table. I shook my head, so she offered Buggie a bite. He held both hands over his mouth.

  “Why didn’t you write her all those years?” Ann asked.

  “Are you saying I’m a bad person? ’Cause if you are, I can’t disagree.” Ann hardly ever criticized me. She didn’t have the self-confidence.

  “Of course not, Loren. You’re a good person. Nobody is saying you’re bad. I just wonder why you didn’t stay in touch when you left home. I’d be hurt if Buggie treated me like you treated your mother.”

  I spit out a shrimp tail. For some reason I’ve always put the whole last bite of shrimp in my mouth and sucked on the tail, then spit it out. Like a cherry and a cherry pit. “I wanted to forget all that.”

  Buggie reached into Ann’s linguini and pulled out a clam.

  “Bet,” he said.

  Ann took the clam. “That’s not a pet, Buggie, it’s a clam.”

  Buggie let out a howl that made the other customers turn. I could see the looks—child abusers. Baby beaters. A kid turns into a pitiless blackmailer the second you take him out in public.

  Ann gave in. “So keep the clam already.” Buggie grasped it with both hands and smiled, which in Buggie was rare enough to make us both stop eating.

  “Forget all what?” Ann asked.

  How to explain? “She’s a cocktail waitress in an oil-field bar,” I started.

  “Buggie, it’s a shell. You can’t keep it.”

  “She buys records and kitchen utensils from ads on TV. She eats frozen chicken potpies—the kind with no bottom crust. And white bread. She cuts coupons from the Sunday paper. All that Chiclet chewing.” I shuddered. “None of Steinbeck’s women chewed gum. No one in Siddhartha even went to the bathroom.”

  Ann was paying more attention to Buggie than to me. “It’s dead, Buggie. Put it down.” Buggie clutched the greasy clam to his heart.

  “My bet.”

  Ann turned back to me. “You hate your mom for chewing gum and going to the bathroom?”

  I wanted to explain something complex and Neptune’s Cavern wasn’t the time or place. “It’s a matter of class. I was real short in high school. Didn’t start growing until I was almost twenty.”

  “What’s that got to do with Chiclets?”

  “People treated me like a spook and I was miserable.”

  “Make Buggie put down the clam.”

  “I kind of like his pet.” Buggie studied the clam closely, muttering sounds that I couldn’t understand. “Nobody thought I was neat. Women ran from me for fear I’d get attached. Don only liked Patrick. Mom kept telling me I would always fail at everything. What’s its name, Buggie?”

  “Don’t encourage him. Your mom didn’t really tell you you would fail at everything.”

  “All pets have a name.”

  Buggie looked at me seriously. “Mary.”

  “Mary the clam. She’s a good pet. Here, you eat her insides.” I reached into Mary, fingered out her meat, and popped it in my mouth. She was a tad gritty. “Now she won’t stink. You can keep a glass of salt water by the bed for her to sleep in at night.”

  “He can’t keep a clam.” Ann tried to look severe, but she could never really be too severe with either of us. Together we had her swamped.

  Buggie didn’t seem to mind or notice the loss of Mary’s insides. He ran his finger around the fan contour of her shell and said, “Mary.”

  I ate another doughy shrimp and drank some red wine, thinking of my youth. I hardly ever think of my youth. “I started reading books,” I said. “The writers treated me with respect I didn’t get at home and the characters had a class I thought everyone except the people around me had. Book characters never curl their hair or use Kleenex. Books became real and real became something to ignore.”

  Ann’s index finger rolled around her wineglass rim. “When Mom was sick, I used to pretend I was Nancy Drew. Nancy never had to change her mom’s colostomy bag.”

  Buggie held the clam like a puppet and made the two halves move up and down like lips. “Hewo, will you play with me?” Play came out pway, which could have two meanings.

  “Oh God,” Ann sighed. “All we need now is an imaginary friend.”

  “I think it’s great. Shows imagination and adaptability that he can find friendship in a shell.”

  “You still should write your mother.”

  Buggie held the clam over his glass of Sprite. “I’m firsty.”

  “Tell Mary what you did today,” I said.

  “Foonral.”

  11

  For the next three years, Mary was Buggie’s only friend and companion. They talked together, played together, slept together. My glass of salt water by the bed didn’t go over. Buggie said she would drown. He didn’t seem to connect that Mary once lived undersea. After months of handling, she didn’t even look like a clam anymore. The ridges wore flat and smooth and Buggie’s grubby thumbprint appeared at the base of each half. I thought the imaginary pal obsession would peter out when Mary’s hinges fell apart, but Buggie acted as if he didn’t notice. He carried both halves in his pocket and slept with them under the pillow same as ever.

  “He loves that clam more than me,” Ann said.

  “At least he’s not lonely.”

  “But a clam.”

  Thinking of those three years is like thinking about a book I liked years ago, but haven’t read since. I wasn’t me. I was a comfortable minor character, eating, sleeping, walking from over here to over there. I stopped examining myself—which is very strange for me. I found a job cleaning bricks. The construction company I worked for would buy an old building and flatten it, then send my crew in with gloves and hammers and we’d knock all the chinking off the bricks and stack them in a truck. Most of the crew were college graduates who couldn’t find jobs in their chosen field—English and sociology majors mostly. We used to discuss the whale symbolism in Moby Dick over our thermos bottles and plastic-wrapped sandwiches at lunch.

  The best thing about a career in brick cleaning—at least in Denver—is every December the temperature drops so cold a brick shatters when you hammer it. That meant company layoffs and four months of collecting unemployment checks while I wrote Westerns. State employment commissions are the new art patrons of modern America.

  In a blazing example of Unexplainable Shit, Berkley Publishing bought my first Western. I ca
lled it Barney Runs Amok and used Kelly Palamino as my pen name. I thought Palamino sounded like a cross between an Italian and a horse. They gave me five hundred dollars and twelve complimentary copies. I signed eight of the books and sent them to Victoria to Mom. One went to Ann’s father.

  Meanwhile, Ann kept the steady income flowing from her day-care job. She was very sober about her work, much more sober than I was about brick cleaning or writing. Ann thought she affected the futures of her kids. She was scared to death one would grow up to be a rapist or a suicide and it would be her fault.

  Buggie grew like those crystals that explode when you drop them in water. He grew too fast. I liked him at three, I wanted him to stay three forever. Then I liked him at four, but he wouldn’t stop there either. His face thinned as he aged, giving him that grown-up head on a child’s body that was so popular in TV commercials back then. He demanded independence, wouldn’t let Ann or me do anything for him. I remember mornings we all sat in a circle for forty-five minutes while Buggie struggled with his shoes. Just when I thought he had them on and tied, Buggie would decide the socks weren’t perfect. He’d yank everything off and start all over.

  Ann taught Buggie necessary stuff like colors and numbers, traffic signs, the seasons, the four food groups, but the more vital aspects of his education were in my hands. Every night after our romp, Buggie bathed and climbed into his jammies and sat on the edge of his bed with Mary perched on the night-stand, waiting for my reading of Important Works.

  Being a parent is an amazing project—you’re given this beautiful, fertile, empty mind and told to fill it up with any ideas you want. What power. What responsibility. No one cares if you’re paranoid or racist or live in fantasyland, whatever you think matters is what you dump into this little person, where it germinates and flourishes. I chose to fill Buggie with the most noble thoughts from all the hundreds of generations who have searched for Truth. He would grow up to be the sum total of the human experience—a goal which I admit put a lot of weight on the little fellow’s shoulders.

  After one round of O. Henry, I spent a year on the classics—Jason and the Argonauts, The Aeneid, The Odyssey. I read him Walden and Sand County Almanac and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He loved Slaughterhouse Five, though he claimed it made Mary cry. By kindergarten, Buggie had already heard every book Fitzgerald wrote. He was conversant with Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March. He told his teacher he would laugh her out of the classroom if she pulled that Dick and Jane crap on him.