Lydia

by Tim Sandlin

  The closer we came to downtown, the more glass was broke. Whole buildings lay on their sides, and some had fell into their own basements. Mission Street was in flames. We passed the Oddfellow Building, and it was all gone. I found out later some Oddfellows had been asleep in the rooms upstairs and they all expired. I wasn’t sorry about that.

  When we reached the barbershop, the fire was almost to Kearny Street. The keyhole was too hot to put the key into, and Dad and me were so worked up over the flames that at first we didn’t notice the glass window was gone, so we needn’t use the door, anyway. We went in to save what we could. Dad got his clippers. There was no time to move the cash register or barber chair. I grabbed one bottle of hair tonic, and we ran.

  Later, we went up on a hill and watched the barbershop burn.

  ***

  The fires went two days. They stopped three blocks short of our yellow house, so we were spared much of the pain that befell others. If we had lived up by the Oddfellow Building, I guess I would have died when I was twelve, and the rest of my life would have been somebody else’s dream.

  ***

  After the earthquake, Mom wouldn’t stay in California. She wouldn’t go in a building or stand at the bottom of a slope. She didn’t sleep at all. We were on our way back to Delaware, where Dad was supposed to stop the barber life and go into furniture, but in Billings, Montana, life changed—once more in a single breath. We got off the train to overnight in the Shamrock Hotel, and Mama was killed by a boiler blew up in the middle of the night. Dad and me was thrown clear, or we’d of been killed too. I landed on a porch of 139 Imeson Avenue, which was across two streets from the hotel.

  “Hold on,” Lydia said. “You flew two blocks and landed on a front porch?”

  Oly rotated his head and glared at Lydia, who said, “You expect us to believe that drivel?”

  “Let him tell the story,” Irene Dukakis said.

  “It’s a waste of my time if he’s going to lie.”

  “Oly doesn’t lie,” Irene said.

  Oly blinked slowly, cleared his throat with a disgusting rattle, and started over. “I was born in Dover, Delaware, in 1893.”

  Lydia panicked. “Wait! Stop! You already said that part.”

  Irene straightened Oly’s already straight collar. “If you interrupt, he’ll lose his place and have to go back to the beginning.”

  “Wait a minute.” Lydia hit Rewind, then Stop, then Play.

  Dad and me was thrown clear, or we’d of been killed too. I landed on a porch of 139 Imeson Avenue, which was across two streets from the hotel.

  Lydia punched Stop again. She and Irene both looked at Oly. Would he recapture the moment? Oly blinked again and gave a half nod. He cleared his throat once more.

  I landed on the front porch of 139 Imeson Avenue, which was across two streets from the hotel. That is how I come to meet the Coxes.

  Lydia’s sigh at this point is quite clear on the tape.

  Mrs. Cox walked out on the porch and found me laying there with a broke leg and she said, “What are you doing on my porch?” and I said, “I don’t know, ma’am, I was asleep,” and she hit me with a broom.

  Mr. Cox come out and said, “Can’t you see the boy is hurt?”

  Mrs. Cox said, “That’s no excuse for calling without an invitation.”

  They took me into the parlor and laid me out on a red velvet sofa and gave me lemonade sweetened with molasses. My leg was hurting pretty good and I’d hit my head on the porch railing, so when Mr. Cox suggested a doctor be sent for I said okay.

  Only the Billings doctors was busy taking care of those in the explosion, especially those that were expired such as Mom, so no one got time to treat me till the next morning. My head ached to the extent where it affected my vision. Mr. Cox had me drink a little laudanum that he’d bought from the Chinese for emergencies—which is somewhat a coincidence, considering how Dad turned out later—and I spent most of the afternoon and evening either asleep or incoherent, I’m not certain which. I dreamed Mom was fixing a breakfast of slab ham and coffee, with her hair up on her head held in place by two chopstick-looking sticks. She smiled in my direction.

  Later that night, I come to with a wet cloth over my eyes and a girl of no more than eight years setting next to me on the divan reading a Monkey Ward Wish Book. After she took the cloth off my eyes, she showed me a drawing of a ribbon there on the page.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Would it look pretty next to my hair?”

  I said, “Has anyone seen my folks?”

  “I imagine they’re blown up with the hotel. What’s your name?”

  She had freckles and tiny teeth. Eighty-seven years later, I still can call up a picture of those tiny teeth.

  I said, “I don’t recall.”

  She laughed like this was queer, which I guess it was, for a person not to know their own name, but I took offense anyway. I said, “You fly through the air and land on your head and leg and see how much you remember.”

  She said, “I wouldn’t forget my own name,” and I said, “Which is?” That’s when she told me: “Agatha Ann Cox.”

  “Is this your family’s house?”

  “All except Bill, he went south to be a cowboy.”

  I wondered if I was supposed to know who Bill was. When a person is incoherent, they can be told things that later they don’t recall.

  Real solemn-like, she said, “My father is Mr. Cox.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, and talk hurt my head, so I didn’t give a rejoinder.

  She went on anyhow. “Mr. Cox owns the bank downtown. He takes care of the money.”

  “You think he might give me some?”

  She screwed her mouth up like she was considering the proposition. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll ask him. There might be a thousand or so laying around with nobody’s name to it.”

  I said, “I’d appreciate that.”

  ***

  Mr. Cox found Dad at the Saint Vincent Hospital where the Sisters of Charity had taken Mom and the others. Three or so bodies had been scorched to the condition you couldn’t recognize who they’d been, and Dad thought one of these was me, so when Mr. Cox told him of my whereabouts, Dad was greatly relieved. I heard later he cried and made a scene to the point where the other bereaved were not comfortable.

  They brought Dad to the Coxes’, where I was sitting up on the divan eating breakfast with Agatha and Mrs. Cox. It was only oatmeal. There wasn’t coffee on account of the Coxes being Anabaptists. Dad’s pupils were tiny pushpin prick holes, and his fingers trembled when he hugged me. I would normally be made sheepish to have him hug me in front of the Cox women, but this time I didn’t mind much. After all, Mom was dead, and he’d thought I was along with her.

  He said, “Your mama didn’t suffer.” I don’t know how he knew this. Or even why it mattered so much to him. She was dead either way. A big lead mirror frame had fallen across her and broke her neck in half. He said, “She never even woke up.”

  I said, “That’s for the best,” because I knew he wanted me to say so.

  I felt real bad about Mom being dead and all, but more for me than her. She was too scared of life to enjoy it. When you wake up each day fully expecting to be killed, the coming to pass finally is a relief.

  While we talked, the doctor appeared on the Coxes’ front porch. Billings had three regular doctors, a female doctor, and a Chinese fella did medicine with needles. Dr. Harriet Clarke, the female, had eyebrows you could clean a chimney with. She’d been awake since the explosion the morning before and had performed several amputations since breakfast, so she didn’t waste no bedside sympathy on a boy with a broke leg.

  She set it quick. There was a flash of white pain, then I was okay. For my concussion she rubbed my skull with a liniment made from ammonia, prairie-chicken eggs, and a pair of
secret ingredients. It was white, kind of like milk of magnesia, and smelled of sulfur. Whatever the secret ingredients were must of done the trick, because my head pain fled and I could see normal again.

  Before Dr. Harriet took her leave, she said to Dad, “You’d better lay off the stuff.”

  Dad said, “I lost my wife Portia,” and Dr. Harriet answered with, “That’s reason enough today, but this boy will need tending tomorrow.”

  I did not know then, but the cause for Dad’s pupils being pushpin prick holes was opium. To this day, I suspect he’d discovered opium in San Francisco, which is why he knew so much about Chinatown and the Chinese ways. Whenever he started doesn’t matter so much. The truth is, my father became an addict, just as bad as any in a magazine. I think the grief drove him so he didn’t want to feel or think straight ever again. That was his choice. I do not wish to speak poorly of my dad, but, so far as living goes, his life ended with Mama’s.

  In that deep, dark place that Mary Beth alternately thought of as her guts or her heart, she never truly believed Leroy was dead. Everyone from the days when she’d been with him said he was dead. A man named Dolf told her he saw Leroy’s body, riddled with bullets, every bone in his right hand broken. Dolf said the Colombian cartel threw Freedom into a village well, in hopes the rotting decay would make the peasants sick.

  “If he was so riddled with bullets, how could you tell it was him?” Mary Beth asked.

  “The tattoo on his chest. Only one man in the world has that tattoo.”

  Mary Beth nodded her agreement, but in her dark place, she knew better. Some people don’t die. Like Elvis or Jesus. Or more like Butch Cassidy. Exactly like Butch Cassidy, because they both of them went to South America to get killed—or not killed—when it could just as easily have happened at home.

  Over the years, she moved from Boulder to Telluride and on to Houston. In Houston, she married Lonnie Bath. They moved to Santa Fe, where Jazmine was born, followed eighteen months later by Meadow. Mary Beth found a good job as a chiropractor’s receptionist; Lonnie went into construction. And every day of the journey, she expected Leroy to walk through the door and claim her as his own. She didn’t speak of him to anyone, not even Lonnie, and the few friends she kept up with from the freak days didn’t say a word about the possibility, but Mary Beth knew—her happiness was an illusion. It was temporary.

  She refused to buy more than one roll of toilet paper at a time, and her family made do with the travel-sized tube of toothpaste. She never subscribed to a magazine, always paid full newsstand prices. Mary Beth knew better than to tempt God. She knew that if she took the future for granted, Leroy would rise from the dead and bite her.

  And then, one day, he did.

  She was driving home from the Suds’n’Duds Laundromat, where she’d washed eight loads, an entire week’s worth of clothes in a single organized attack involving almost one hundred quarters. Meadow was strapped in the back, sleeping, Jazmine sat in the front seat next to Mary Beth, jabbering about a boy at her day care who could eat Play-Doh.

  “It turns his poop blue,” Jazmine said.

  “If your poop came out blue, I’d rush you to the emergency room and have you irrigated,” Mary Beth said.

  “What’s irrigated feel like?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  And there he was, leaning against a stoplight with his hands in his pockets, his back slouched as if he had no intention of crossing the street, even if the light did change. He’d lost weight, his head had been shaved in the last couple of months—when Mary Beth knew him he’d had hippie hair—his face had more pockmarks, and his nose had obviously been broken since she had last seen him, but Mary Beth didn’t have a doubt. It was Leroy.

  She instinctively ducked an inch, but it was too late. He’d seen her the moment she saw him. Their eyes locked as Mary Beth’s car glided through the intersection. Leroy didn’t move; his face gave no sign that he recognized her.

  “Mom!”

  “What?”

  Mary Beth saw the bread truck a moment before it was too late. She swerved hard right and hit a parking meter. Both girls broke into loud tears. A man ran from a computer store toward her car. Steam hissed from under the hood. Mary Beth twisted in her seat and looked back at the intersection, but Leroy had disappeared, as if he’d never been there. But he had been there. It was Leroy, and he wasn’t dead.

  6

  “Roger, you must know more third-trimester positions than anyone else on the planet,” Eden Rae O’Connor said to Roger Talbot.

  “I’ve never been with a girl who wasn’t pregnant.”

  “You should write a book.”

  At the moment, Eden’s third-trimester position involved a buck-and-rail fence and two pails. Roger stood behind Eden, counting the various tints of pink in the sunset as five Canada geese flew in single wing formation from the ridge behind Grizzly Lake. Snow on the Sleeping Indian gave off a nice watermelon glow, more from within than any reflection of sunlight. The Sonny Rollins soundtrack to the movie Alfie played in Roger’s head—fourth track, the tune where Kenny Burrell lays down the guitar equivalent of a waterfall.

  “Oh my God,” Eden squealed. “Just as I gazzed, the baby jumped up and kicked.”

  “Are you sure you know what an orgasm is? Nobody comes that quick.”

  “Back up. I think the baby is trying to tell me something.”

  “But I haven’t squirted yet.”

  Eden stepped off the pails and lowered her skirt. “Don’t be selfish, Roger. The baby is more important than your off.”

  “Wasn’t more important than yours.”

  Eden turned and sat on the middle rail of the fence, with her forearms propped across her great belly. “We’ll bonk again in a minute. Maybe it’ll make me go into labor.”

  Roger pulled his jeans up from his packer boots and tried to button his fly, but it wasn’t comfortable. “You want to go into labor this early?”

  “I love you dearly, Roger, but all I want right now is to have this baby, give it away, and go home to Pasadena.”

  Later on, as they walked across the west pasture back toward Roger’s cabin, she entwined her fingers in his free hand. Roger liked this. He wasn’t used to much display of affection after the fact.

  Eden said, “You know when we’re doing it, do you feel any emotions?”

  Roger considered the question. “Do you want me to?”

  “I was just wondering what you feel while we’re scrogging.”

  “I felt peaceful back there. The sky was a pretty color, and you’re easy to be with. So I would say I felt comfortable.”

  “That’s nice. I’d rather you be comfortable than any of that other emotional gunk boys talk about after they get off.” They walked on across the sagebrush. Eden held her belly with her left hand and Roger with her right. “Honor told me that when you first came here, you couldn’t talk.”

  An owl hooted down by the river. Roger thought it was a female barn owl, but he wasn’t sure. Owls had never been his strong suit.

  “Is that true?” Eden asked.

  Roger pulled his tie-dyed bandanna low over his eyebrows. It gave him the look of a Grateful Dead roadie. “I wish Honor was the one who can’t talk.”

  “Was it you couldn’t, or you wouldn’t?”

  “Didn’t seem much difference, at the time.”

  “Why did you stop talking?”

  Roger thought before he answered. He liked Eden and didn’t want to fall back on the quick, smart-aleck answers he usually gave such questions. “As I understand the deep mental crap, if I knew why I quit, I wouldn’t have quit.”

  “How long did you go without talking?”

  He shrugged.

  “You can’t remember?”

  “Nope. Don’t want to either.”

  She stopped and looked at him. Most late-pregn
ancy teenagers can’t see beyond their own bodies. Roger had the feeling that six months after they went home, not one in ten even remembered what he looked like. But now, in the soft evening alpenglow, Eden was staring right at him. “I’ll bet you had something God-awful terrible happen in your past, made you forget and stop talking.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” Roger walked on, immediately regretting his words. I once told him that being flippant is how men sidestep intimacy. If Roger had a tragic flaw, it was his innate talent for sidestepping intimacy. He had recently promised me he would never answer a sincere woman’s question glibly, yet here, the first test out, he’d failed. God knows with girls sincerity is hard, but you’ve got to try.

  Eden hurried to catch up. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”

  “How could you not think about it?”

  “There’s a reason people forget terrible things. If everybody remembered every detail about their past, the whole world would go insane.”

  “But what if you’re Princess Di’s illegitimate son, given up at birth the way I’m giving up my baby? Or you’re the next Dalai Lama?”

  “If I was the next Dalai Lama some monk from Tibet would drive up the river and tell me.”

  “I know!” Eden’s face lit up like the watermelon snow on the Sleeping Indian. “You witnessed a grisly murder, and the murderer is someone famous who’s been on TV, and unless you remember, he’ll get away scot-free. Only he knows you know, and when you remember, his goose will be cooked, so he’s hired a band of private detectives to search the countryside, and when they find you, he’ll slit your throat.”