Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  Part Five

  16

  On the fourth day, it rained. Not an exciting summer thunder-head rain like the storms that used to rip across the city in Houston. This rain was more in the line of a cold mountain drizzle. I woke up completely out of the spiritual enlightenment mood. Maybe it was the dream about Buggie and Ann, or maybe I missed Lana Sue. Maybe I was just hungry. Whatever the cause, all my religious fervor pissed out across the wet ground.

  What I really wanted was a hot bath, two giant towels, a steak and eggs breakfast, and to hold Lana Sue for an hour or so. Then I wanted to make love—oral first, then vaginal—and drink three cups of coffee with real cream. Nothing even vaguely connected to a day of Fig Newtons, drizzle, and climbing a mountain.

  I hung the daypack in a low Doug fir and draped my wet sleeping bag around the branches. It was fiberfill instead of goose down, so I figured to be somewhat warm the next night, even if I had to sleep damp.

  The bag formed a sort of canopy over one spot of almost dry earth. My legs had to stay out in the rain, but I made the rest of myself as comfortable as possible, considering. Five or six Fig Newtons later, I flipped open the Spell-Write notebook and wrote, I now understand why most world religions sprung from the desert climate. I chewed another Newton and watched rain drip off a big whitebark across the ledge. The mist was so fine that the tree seemed to be gathering moisture from the air and manufacturing raindrops.

  The whitebark made me think of God, which made me think of Buggie. Where was my son? Even if I could narrow it down to dead or alive, that would be something. Not knowing anything was a pain in the butt which, as time passed, was taking all the kick out of my new life with Lana Sue.

  Here I was with a perfect wife, big bucks, a cabin in the woods within the sound of running water, all the time I needed to write or love or do whatever I felt like doing—my life’s goals accomplished and it wasn’t worth stale crap because my brain was stuck in one agonizing rut. Where the fuck was my kid?

  I skipped three lines and wrote, Ignorance of an answer is worse than the worst of all possible answers.

  I mean, I knew where Ann was. Or at least I knew where Ann’s body was. She’d brought a husband’s worst nightmare to reality. My wife killed herself. Try facing that fact one day at a time.

  However, over the last four years, I’d been forced to pay the bills, brush my teeth, tie my shoes, change the oil in the car. I’d taken hundreds of walks in the woods. I’d earned Lana Sue’s understanding. Somehow I’d worked out a way of dealing with Ann’s death—I’d come to a sort of quiet, sad acceptance. But there was no way of accepting Buggie’s fate, no way to deal with it and let go.

  So, I worked out my cockamamie theory that God could be finagled into coughing up a few answers. Cheyennes did it. Jesus did it. Confucius, Max Brand. If all those people could weird themselves into visions of truth, so could I. And God owed me more than a simple dead or alive. If Buggie was dead, I wanted some real whereabouts information. No more hocus-pocus; religion is an extensive wine list, pick your vintage and pop the cork. I demanded truth.

  Lana Sue let me run with the obsession until I started talking to Buggie and God instead of her. Now she was gone and the purpose of the search was suddenly fuzzy. The entire process had one final goal: freedom to live wholeheartedly with Lana Sue. But to reach that goal, I’d lost her. I was working backwards.

  The thing to do was to run to the top of the mountain, get this religious catharsis jive over with, and go find my wife. My live wife. The wife who made me happy and life worth the mess.

  I spoke to the dripping whitebark. “God better be there when I make the top of the hill because I’m not hanging around until He shows up.”

  The whitebark just dripped. I wasn’t crazy enough yet to hear talking trees. Maybe at the top.

  With that, I shrugged on my daypack, then pulled my sleeping bag around my head, shoulders, and back, and trotted off into the wet forest—must have looked like a jogging hunchback in a nylon shawl.

  • • •

  After Ann’s suicide, I decided that any artificial mind diversion was a cheat and had to go, so I stopped drinking alcohol and watching television. Life suddenly got real. Each morning I woke up on the couch, terrified. I ate a bowl of Corn Chex and half a grapefruit. Then I sat at the kitchen table and worked on Disappearance for eight hours. What had been the facing of one loss became the avoidance of another.

  After I finished my day’s work, I fixed a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and popped open a Dr Pepper. I sat on the couch to eat and didn’t get back up until the next day. I could sleep for short periods on the couch in my clothes. Any attempt at the bed or undressing brought on vivid images of Ann in her coffin, then Ann rotting under the ground. I saw her face decompose. The hollows under her cheekbones went first, then the indentations on her temples. Her neck turned stringy. Her eyes opened. I woke up terrified.

  This went on about three months. The landlady dropped by for the rent, which I couldn’t pay. She knew the circumstances, however, and didn’t have the heart to throw me into the street. Once she brought a casserole dish of mulligan stew, but I couldn’t eat meat yet. I set the dish out the back door for the neighborhood dogs.

  I remember doing a hundred push-ups one night. It took a couple of hours. Another time, Ann’s boss from the day care came over. I pretended she was with the KGB and I was being questioned for thoughts against the state. I found a dead daddy longlegs and buried her in one of Ann’s hanging plant pots. The plant had dried up the summer Buggie left, so I figured I’d get some use from the dirt.

  The police called and made me drive downtown to see another dead little boy. It wasn’t Buggie.

  I came to hitchhiking in Nevada. The driver was an old lady wearing white gloves and a box hat with a net over her face. She asked why I wanted to see Max Brand’s grave. She said she couldn’t stand graveyards, hadn’t been in one since Mr. Dodd died.

  “Who’s Mr. Dodd?” I asked.

  “He was my husband.”

  I wandered the San Joaquin Valley for several days before a cub reporter on some newspaper told me Max Brand was really Frederick Faust, who was buried in Italy. After that, I wound up in jail in Hannibal, Missouri, on a drunk and disorderly charge. Mark Twain isn’t buried in his hometown either.

  I spent three days in jail—with some very strange people—before a deputy decided I couldn’t still be drunk. A psychiatrist was called in and the final upshot was my brother, Patrick, flew up from Texas and took me back to Denver.

  By then, Patrick had gone big in Alcoholics Anonymous. It was his life and religion. I think he spent as much time on AA as he used to on alcohol, but at least he got more done and he was easier to be around. He also had more money. Draining swamps for real estate had been lucrative since he sobered up. Patrick paid my back rent and a couple of months to spare. He took me to Kroger’s and bought a shopping cart full of frozen dinners and organic vitamins.

  As I drove him out to Stapleton International, Patrick told me to straighten up and join AA, even though I wasn’t necessarily a drunk.

  “AA is like having a real family,” he said. “Haven’t you ever wanted a real family?”

  “You bet.”

  Patrick flew away, I went home and back to Disappearance.

  • • •

  In late June I hooked back up with the brick cleaning company. I enjoy cleaning bricks. It’s outdoors, physical, yet not too heavy. The hammering is controlled, almost gentle. You can’t just go crazy and start smashing mortar. Even then, I wasn’t into smashing.

  After cleaning bricks all day, I wrote in the evenings and on weekends. Nights, I drank beer and watched television. I found a midnight-to-dawn radio talk show that was hosted by a woman whose voice was soothing. Her name was Kathy, like my sister’s. Only cranks and lonely people telephoned her, so I turned the sound off whenever a cal
l came in, then I turned it back up in time to hear Kathy’s voice again. Real late at night, right before sleep, I downed four measured ounces of Jim Beam and three aspirins—not a bad combination.

  I’d had to start Disappearance all over after Ann used the manuscript to light the baby-bed fire. The book was probably better for it. The first three-fourths were about Buggie and the last part dealt with how we were treated and what it felt like after he left. I wrote a lot about guilt, anxiety, and loss.

  One night it was too hot to sit in the duplex watching Odd Couple reruns, so I climbed into the Chevelle and circled Denver for a few hours. I drifted all over the city, cruising the franchise strips, watching people in the other cars. At a Big Boy on State Street I met a girl who claimed to be a prostitute. I’m not certain how it happened, or if I drove down there looking for a hooker or what. She certainly didn’t try to entrap me. She hardly spoke a sentence.

  “Twenty dollars,” she said.

  “Are you really a hooker?”

  “Do I look like a Girl Scout?”

  She looked like someone’s teenage daughter was what she looked like. A baby-sitter maybe, the kind that drinks giant forty-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola and chews gum while she talks on your phone. She was dark, with pretty eyes and a tiny overbite. Long silver earrings dangled from both ears, but the right ear had a second fake diamond post up in the cartilage.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Teresa, listen, I need a yes or a no here.”

  “How old are you?”

  “You want my life history or you want to get laid?”

  She was young and vulnerable and I was old and couldn’t afford her. However, I hadn’t been laid in just over three years. Abstinence that long changes a person’s standards.

  “I’ll do it if you’ll wash off some makeup,” I said.

  “That’ll cost extra.”

  She took me to a hotel room straight out of a bad French movie about artists and heroin addicts. The place was almost too bare to be filthy. I’d have run away if the naked light bulb had been more than forty watts.

  “Do you live here, Teresa?”

  “You want straight, oral, or half and half?”

  When we came to the actual act, I failed. As I fingered Teresa’s little nipple, I remembered the last time I’d had sex, the day Buggie disappeared. That was the last time before she died that Ann and I talked as friends and lovers, the last time she trusted me.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Teresa.

  “Happens all the time.”

  I paid her ten dollars an hour to lie next to me and hold me while I slept. The next morning, I awoke with an erection and finished the job.

  Every couple of weeks the rest of the summer and early fall, I drove down to State Street and found Teresa. I looked at it as letting the air out of my tires before the pressure mounted and I blew a tube. She looked at it as business. Even though she hardly ever spoke more than five words, I suppose I would have eventually gotten involved in Teresa’s personal life. I generally do when I sleep with a woman.

  However, sometime in October she disappeared. I hung around eating pie in the Big Boy for three nights straight, but Teresa didn’t show. No one answered when I knocked at her room. I tried asking the more obvious hookers on the street if they’d seen her. A couple knew who I was talking about, but no one seemed to know where she’d gone. The women offered to do the task for her, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d grown fond of Teresa. I didn’t feel like trying another whore.

  Eventually I wandered home and went back to letting the air out of my tires the old way, by hand.

  • • •

  I finished Disappearance on a Saturday afternoon in November. The last scene took place in the same graveyard that holds Peter Pym and Mary Louise Wolfe. A backhoe rests behind a canvas canopy. Seven or eight day-care teachers and moms watch as Ann is lowered into the ground. I stare off through the falling snow.

  The scene was sad and emotional to write, but to tell the truth, after dwelling on one subject for over a year and then typing four hundred pages on that subject, I was burnt. Anyone who has ever lived day and night for a goal, then reached that goal, knows what I mean about the post-finish depression.

  I skipped two lines and typed THE END. My fingers on the keyboard were a strange greenish-yellow color. The keyboard itself was dusty. A dirty thumbprint showed on the space bar. Why hadn’t I seen those things before? I hit the line return a couple more times, then typed WHAT NEXT?

  There were me and my ghosts and my manuscript—too many entities for one small duplex. Someone had to leave right away and I had a horrible feeling that if it wasn’t me it would be the manuscript. Five more minutes alone in a room with that book and I would have burned it again. By the time I reached the Chevelle, air came in short gasps. I felt like a family fleeing poltergeists.

  I drove all the way to Boulder and back before I could catch my breath enough to think in a straight line. There was a yearning of some kind. I wanted to be near someone I knew. I circled State, searching for Teresa, then I drove up to Denver University just in case some old English professor might be wandering through the parking lot. I got to thinking about Ann. She would have been proud that I finished a book. She always had more faith in my writing than I did. At least until Buggie disappeared.

  I cruised the apartment complex where we lived when we met. A light was on in her place. A cardboard skeleton left over from Halloween hung in the window.

  One year on my birthday, Ann found a baby-sitter and took me to a gigantic restaurant out by the Interstate named Los Gatos. That would be the place to stop and drink the yearning into nostalgia. Ann had been happy the night of my birthday. Maybe I’d feel close to her there, close to the real Ann that I met, not the dazed Ann that I lost.

  I circled the off-ramps until I realized Los Gatos no longer existed. The big rock armory building had been transformed into a country-western nightclub. As a rule, I wasn’t much interested in cowboy music. The words swung back and forth from self-pity to smug, and I don’t much care for that pair of emotions. No one admires the crap he wallows in.

  However, I wasn’t familiar with any other nearby bars, and I’d developed a sudden craving to be around people. From the Chevelle, I watched the crowd of men in long-sleeve shirts and women in tight jeans with wide belts as they milled in and out of the horseshoe-shaped front door. They certainly qualified as people—not the sort of people I’d ever talked to, but, by then, I was pretty well out of people I’d ever talked to. Anyhow, whether they would speak to me or not, I could always kill the craving with Jim Beam.

  • • •

  I spotted Lana Sue Goodwin while she was paying the cover. She’d gained some weight and her hair was styled like a grownup—all swirls and differing lengths. Her eyes were tight, as if the skin had stretched. Much alcohol had been processed since high school, but this was definitely Lana Sue. How could I forget a woman whose name I’d carried on my butt for eighteen years?

  She beelined for the back bar to an empty stool three or four down from where I nursed a Jim Beam on the rocks. In the mirror, I watched her order a double something, a single something, and an empty glass. She held the double glass the way people do who need what they’re holding, not the offhand way of a woman at a cocktail party. Same with her cigarette. Something since graduation from Bellaire High had made Lana Sue nervous.

  The cowboy on her other side asked her to dance, but she shook her head no without looking at him. When he got up to ask another woman, I slid down the bar and stole his stool. I don’t think Lana Sue recognized me. She didn’t even see me. As she mixed her drinks, then swirled the glass, Lana Sue appeared totally oblivious to her surroundings. For a moment, I thought nothing mattered to her except for what she was thinking about, then I realized her eyes weren’t foggy at all, they were fixated on the band way down at the o
ther end of the room.

  It wasn’t a bad band as far as cowboy music goes. I didn’t know squat about country western, but the tune was kind of catchy and familiar. I caught myself tapping my sneaker along to the violin’s melody.

  They were an odd-looking group—a pretty girl in a Dale Evans outfit stood out front holding her acoustic guitar way high in front of her, several inches higher than most rock and rollers hold their guitars. Three guys in matching cowboy shirts played behind her and what looked like two old winos held down the sides of the stage. The winos had on clothes like I would wear to shoot pool.

  The pretty girl sang a song I recognized called “Echo of an Old Man’s Last Ride.” It’s about suicide. The words are interesting—outside your usual country-western theme.

  Lana Sue turned sculpture behind the veil of wispy blue smoke curling up from her cigarette. Her hands didn’t move. She didn’t blink. I watched closely, but saw no sign that she even breathed until after the last note of the song. Then, as the crowd cheered and applauded, Lana Sue exhaled a monumental sigh. Her eyes went all slick and she used both hands to bring her drink up for a sip.

  I was staring at her face from about eight inches away, yet she never noticed me. She chewed the corner of her lower lip for a moment, then touched her tongue to the midpoint of the upper lip. As the girl singer gave a little speech introducing the next song, Lana Sue’s face changed. First there was distress, pain. Then her face lit in a smile. Then she chugged down the rest of her drink.

  I used the same line I’d tried so many years earlier when she walked me into the stop sign. “You look dejected.”

  She stared at me, still not remembering. “I am dejected. That’s my daughter singing that song.”

  I looked at Lana Sue’s daughter onstage. The resemblance was a hoot. Same dark, thick hair, same wide mouth and high cheekbones. Same long neck. “You should be proud of her,” I said.

  “She ran away from home. That tall sucker on the pedal steel is my old boyfriend and her new one. You ever hear anything so sick?”