Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  Ann shivered. “Loren, it’s broad daylight. What will the neighbors think?”

  “The neighbors can fuck each other, I’ll take care of you.”

  “Loren.”

  I turned Ann around and kissed her. Soapy hands slid up the back of my neck.

  “It’s daytime, Loren.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  We kissed awhile longer with Ann whispering, “But, but,” every few kisses and me whispering, “Of course we can.” Soon, her body pressed harder against mine, her breathing deepened, and she stopped the “but, buts.” Seduction always works when the woman is washing dishes. Hot, sudsy water must be an aphrodisiac.

  “Where’s Buggie?” she whispered.

  I ran my fingers down the muscles of her back. “He’s okay. He’s next door loading a dump truck.”

  “That feels good. Touch there. Yeah, are you sure he’ll be okay?”

  “He’s in kid heaven over there.”

  I took Ann’s hand and led her to the tent. Before lifting the flap, we looked over at Buggie playing with three little boys on a mound of dirt beside a pair of lodgepole pines. Buggie leaned forward, smoothing the earth with a piece of bark.

  “He’s getting filthy,” Ann said.

  “He’s fine. Buggie needs to play with other boys more.”

  “I hope he doesn’t ruin his new tennis shoes.”

  The sex that last time was warm, slow, and emotional—no intricate positions, no intense thrashing about—just basic easy lovemaking. I kept my eyes open, watching the levels of passion flit across Ann’s face. With my finger, I traced the lines across her forehead, the pink on the inside of her barely parted lips. I felt her breasts and stomach and legs against me. She concentrated on what she felt right then; her harmony with the immediate moment was so great, I felt a little saddened that I could never lose myself so completely as Ann. I remember the gasp she made when she came. And the softness in her eyes when she looked at me afterwards.

  Later, Ann pulled a sleeping bag over us and we lay next to each other, watching the canvas roof breathe in the wind. She relaxed into the hollow between my shoulder and ribs. I draped her dark blond hair across my chest. “Where should we hike?”

  She snuggled closer. “Somewhere flat for Buggie.”

  “Mountains aren’t usually flat.”

  “How about around a lake?”

  “Sounds good.” It didn’t matter to me where we hiked. I could have stayed in the tent all day.

  Ann covered her mouth and yawned. “You think I should get Buggie’s eyes checked?”

  “Is he acting like he can’t see?”

  “Some guy from county health came around the day care last week. He said all kids should have their eyes checked before starting kindergarten.”

  “Did his father wear glasses?”

  Ann looked up at me. “Jeez, I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t remember if he wore glasses or not?”

  “It was a long time ago and I barely knew the guy. I don’t notice things like glasses.” Ann ran her fingernails across my stomach. She knew I liked that. “You want chicken or burritos for supper?”

  “Doesn’t matter much to me. Burritos sound good.”

  “Okay, burritos. We’ll have to pick up salsa from the store at Signal Mountain.” Ann felt along the edge of the tent until she found a towel. “You mind dragging the Bug away from the dump truck? I want to clean up some before we leave.”

  “Don’t suppose you’re ready for seconds?”

  Ann laughed. “Once is enough before lunch.”

  No kids were playing on the dirt mound, but I went over to see their work. Little roads wound up and around, one road dead-ended on both ends and was lined with white stones. I figured that one to be Buggie’s. The next-door neighbors sat inside their camper, eating breakfast, the parents on one side of the table, facing the redheaded boys who might have been triplets. They all looked the same age.

  “Have you seen Buggie?”

  The mother chewed and swallowed before she spoke. “Who?”

  “The little boy who was helping build roads out here a while ago.”

  “Oh, him, he’s cute. Doesn’t smile much.” She looked behind me toward the mound. “He was there when I called the boys in.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Five minutes, he couldn’t have gone far.”

  As I crossed back to our camp, Ann came through the tent flap, buttoning her shirt. “Got the Bug?”

  “Can’t find him. The kids he was playing with went in five minutes ago. Their mother said he was still digging when she saw him.”

  “Jeez, Loren, I knew this would happen if we fooled around. You don’t think he heard us, do you?”

  I checked under the picnic table where we’d stashed the fishing equipment. “Pole’s still here, he didn’t go fishing.”

  “Oh, hell, I hate it when I don’t know where he is.”

  “Couldn’t have wandered far. Maybe he climbed something. You look up in the trees, I’ll walk down by the creek and the lake. That’s the only direction where he could hurt himself.”

  This is all we need, I thought, walking back down through the campground and along the creek. Buggie probably heard us making love. He was too young to know what he was hearing, but he’d know it was something he was excluded from. Be just like the kid, hiding to punish us for having fun without him.

  Every thirty feet or so I stopped to call. My main concern was to find him before Ann started worrying. Good moods in Ann were fragile. One hint of guilt and she’d mope the rest of vacation.

  The trail ran downhill with purple lupine lining both sides. I hoped Buggie hadn’t fallen in the creek. It certainly wasn’t deep enough to drown anyone, but we’d have to dry him off and change his clothes and go through a long “Why did you go away alone?” speech. It’d be afternoon by the time we started the hike.

  I stopped to look at a couple of Indian paintbrush. One was a brilliant red, almost an unnatural color. A shell lay pressed into the dirt at its base. I walked a couple of steps before it sunk in that the shell was out of place. On my knees, I dug the shell up and turned it over. Mary.

  I tore through the lupine until I found her other half just off the trail. When I picked it up, the shell broke and the part with Buggie’s thumbprint shook off my hand and into the creek. I leaned over the water, feeling among the rocks and mud. For a moment, one finger touched the shell, breaking it free of the bottom, tumbling it along in the current. I lunged into the creek and crawled downstream after Mary, but my hands and knees roiled up the streambed and I couldn’t follow where she went.

  I called, “Buggie.”

  I staggered out of the creek and ran to the lake. “Buggie.”

  I ran back to the paintbrush and searched the ground again, this time hunting for a footprint or a button or something. Anything. I called again, “Buggie.”

  And again.

  12

  I’d rather not talk about this. Everyone kept saying, “logical explanation.” The other campers, then the park rangers and county deputy-sheriffs. I was ready to scream the next time I heard, “Just you wait, he’ll come back and there’ll be a logical explanation.” There was no logical explanation. Buggie went up in smoke. No amount of tragedy rehearsal even grazes the horror of a worst nightmare come true.

  The police insinuated Buggie either ran away or was stolen by his grandparents. The reporters pushed us and demanded articulate answers. “Mrs. Paul, how does it feel when your son disappears?” Ann stared through them, not seeing or hearing. It was as if the rest of the world ceased to exist. While search parties pored over maps and divided up the area, Ann wandered randomly through the woods and along the shore, calling Buggie in a voice that was more prayer than beckoning.

  We c
amped at Lizard Creek all summer until the snows came in November. I went over every inch of that area a hundred times. “He’s not here,” I said to Ann.

  “I know he’s still alive somewhere. Maybe if we go home he’ll come back there.”

  Back in Denver we mailed posters to kindergartens, day-care centers, and grade schools. We handled leads and religious cranks and well-wishers. We cried. We hated ourselves. I stopped eating. Ann stopped sleeping. Every child on the street caused an emotional explosion.

  Jesus, I’d rather not talk about this.

  Ann and I both did what we had to do to survive each day. Remembering past insanities, I made an appointment at the county mental health center and found someone to talk to. Ann went back to Buggie’s pediatrician for tranquilizers and sleeping pills. He was the only doctor she’d ever known. Ann told me once she used to take barbiturates, so I guess she was reverting to her past also.

  Since I was supposed to be a writer, the therapist at county mental health suggested I try a form of grief therapy called implosion. It’s when you dwell on the cause of your grief until you beat it to death. Then, according to the theory, you let it go. Implosion therapy is a little like cutting an arrowhead out of your chest with a sterilized Bowie knife. My Bowie knife was my typewriter. I started with the first time I saw Buggie and wrote down everything I could remember, every conversation, every look in his eyes, every morning wake-up and good-night kiss.

  The book about Buggie became my obsession while Ann’s obsession was Buggie himself. There’s quite a bit of difference. While I re-created his speech patterns, Ann washed and ironed his shirts and baked brownies just in case he came back suddenly. Every day Ann expected Buggie to walk through the door, and every day he didn’t, she withdrew a little further.

  • • •

  The second rainy October after Buggie disappeared I drove downtown to check out some photographs of a murdered boy at the police station. I didn’t bother to tell Ann where I was going. We’d been through the emotional rip of identifying dead children so often by then—praying it’s not Buggie because there’s a chance he’s still alive, knowing that if it is him the wait will be over, but a new grief just as bad will take its place. The rising gorge of guilt, hope, and fear as we slide the pictures from their manila envelopes, then relief and a sick drop in the stomach when it’s not Buggie. The revulsion at our own emotions for being glad someone else’s son is dead. Finally, nausea at the pictures of white, silent little boys that could have been Buggie. No wonder Ann needed more and more sleeping pills to close her eyes.

  It wasn’t Buggie this time either. I sat at a wide desk with a gray top, shuffling through photos of a little boy about four years old. Blond hair. He’d been found in the well of a farm outside Roanoke, Virginia. I could see the trachial membrane inside a gash that showed from one side of the jaw to the other. He couldn’t have been in the well for long. The Winnie-the-Pooh Collection label was still readable on his T-shirt. He wore OshKosh shorts. His left hand had been cut off.

  “No, this isn’t Buggie,” I said.

  The lieutenant didn’t look up from the papers he was reading, “Well, thanks for coming down. We’ll just have to keep looking.”

  “Sure.”

  Later, I sat in the car and shook. A song called “Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville” played on the radio. I looked at the rain on the station steps and imagined Buggie’s face on the body in the photograph, Buggie’s neck slashed, Buggie’s hand cut off. I imagined Buggie as dead and rotting. I screamed. Something had to change. I had to dump some pain even if it meant giving up hope. Even if it meant forgetting Buggie.

  Driving home on the Interstate, I said, “He’s not coming back,” several times to see how it sounded. Could I believe it? “Buggie is dead.” The words came out all scrambled, like I was speaking backwards or something. They didn’t relate to anything I knew about.

  Two teenage girls from down the street stood on the wet sidewalk in front of our duplex, watching my garage. I waved as I pulled into the driveway, but they didn’t wave back.

  Smoke seeped from the crack under the garage door. I ran through the side entrance and found Ann pressed against the wall, her eyes gone animal. The smoke came from a great wad of white paper stuffed under the pile of baby beds, cradles, and bassinets. She had gone after the beds with my ax before setting the fire.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling Ann toward the door.

  “I don’t have to.”

  The open side door provided enough oxygen to burst the pile of beds into flames.

  I pulled harder, yelling, “It’s okay, let’s go in the house and talk.”

  “Buggie knows every move you make.”

  I leaned down and picked up one of the papers she’d used to start the fire. It was page 148 of my Disappearance manuscript.

  “Please come outside, Ann.”

  “Why?”

  I forced her out into the air and shut the door. Together, we stumbled across the yard through the rain, stopping next to the Chevelle.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Ann looked at me. “I miss Fred.”

  We turned to watch the flames through the garage door windows. The fire was pretty, all oranges and pink, little lines creeping like cancer up the dry wall and under the rafters of the roof. The two teenage girls came over and stood near us.

  One said, “Look at her go.”

  The other said, “Should we try to put it out?”

  Through the window I saw the pile of broken beds and cradles collapse, sinking into the flames. Ann held her hand up at shoulder level, whispering, “Bye-bye.”

  • • •

  Someone called the fire department and soon a group of men in yellow slickers and fire hats stood around watching the garage glow. They pulled out a hose to cool the side of the duplex next to the fire, but the rain did all the real work. After a while the firemen turned the hose off and loitered around the front yard with our neighbors and their children.

  Ann sat on the street curb, her back to the garage. Her dirty blond hair reflected the fire. Once every revolution the blue firetruck light flashed on her face, showing her straight mouth and sunken eyes. I knelt at Ann’s side and touched her shoulder. Her head turned and in the next flash I saw Buggie staring at me, accusing me, never forgiving me. Then the dark came, and when the light circled back, Buggie had been replaced by a mask.

  • • •

  Three months later while I was typing at the kitchen table, Ann sat on the edge of Buggie’s bed and swallowed a large number of pills. She washed the pills down with apple juice. I was working on a scene in which he learned to ice skate and I needed to know what color to make his sweater. I went into the bedroom to search his drawers and found Ann dead on top of the blankets.

  Part Four

  13

  Phone ringing. God, I hate phone ringing. Consciousness fought sleep for ten or twelve jolts, almost lost, then floated to the surface. I moaned and knocked the phone off the nightstand onto the floor. The ringing died; a tiny voice came from under the bed.

  “Billy. Billy G. goddammit. I know you’re in there. It’s important, Billy. Answer the damn phone.”

  Billy? Some nuisances are easier dealt with than ignored. I slid half off the bed so my head hung down near the voice. Blood swept into my ears and the headache of a lifetime roared into the backs of my eyes.

  “Huh?”

  “Put Billy G Tanker on the phone. It’s an emergency.”

  “No Billy here. I’m sleep.” I moved to hang up.

  “He must be in there. We all saw him go in.”

  “No Billy.”

  “Listen, lady, this isn’t funny.”

  Twisting my head, I saw yellow translucent shapes swimming around an unfamiliar room. No Billy in sight. My tongue tasted like old tinfoil. My skin stunk. When I raised myself back t
o bed level, the yellow spots turned black.

  Bedroom was wrong. Walls puke green instead of logs. No cats. Loren should be making coffee. Jesus, my crotch hurt.

  A body next to me rolled over with its mouth open.

  Self-revulsion tidal-waved through my chest. The broken vacuum, Loren’s face when I hit him, the asphalt highway to Rock Springs, a marching storm, Mickey and Cassie on the phone, scotch, quarts of scotch—the bad dream was true.

  I closed my eyes in hopes it would go away. “Jesus, what did I do this time?”

  The voice on the phone begged, “Please, this is an emergency. Put Billy G on.”

  The body was still there when my eyes opened. It chewed and mumbled in its sleep. Must be Billy G. I wondered where I got him. Or why. He was kind of cute, in a cleft-chin sort of way, but what a baby face. He couldn’t be young as he looked, my crotch hurt too much for that, but this Billy G was definitely a young one. Reminded me of a boyfriend Cassie or Connie had in the eighth grade. Son of a pawing psychoanalyst.

  I shook the hairy arm draped over his forehead. “Are you Billy G?”

  Both eyes popped open, staring at the ceiling. Green eyes, dazed green eyes.

  “Phone’s for you,” I said.

  “Phone?”

  “Telephone.”

  Naked, I slid from the bed into the bathroom. There’s no place like a bathroom for staring in the mirror and hating yourself in the morning. Weight on the palms of my hands, I leaned over the sink and looked at the slimy woman I’d turned into. Bruise-colored bags wilted under my eyes. Lines cracked from the edge of my mouth to saggy jawbones. My hair looked exhausted.

  Yesterday, I lived in a cabin in the mountains, a cabin with a room all my own and a husband who knew what that meant. Today, I’m a hussy.

  What would Loren think? What would Daddy think? I knew what Daddy would think. He’d tell Mama I finally reached my potential.

  Not that this was the first time I’d ever woken up in the wicked woman position—motel room, dead bottle on the floor, hairy stranger in bed, awful odors. But it was the first time since that night in south Denver with Loren.