by Tim Sandlin
Roger smiled, which wasn’t something he did on a regular basis. “Your story makes as much sense as any of the others I’ve dreamed up.”
“Why did you start talking again?”
“Don’t know that either.” Roger stopped to hang the pails on the side of the snowmobile shed. “Yes, I do. At supper one night, I wanted cornbread, and Auburn was whining about hockey or something, and Maurey wasn’t paying any attention, so I thought to myself, this pointing-and-signing stuff is stupid.
“Is that when you started talking?”
“I said, ‘Please pass the fucking cornbread.’”
Eden’s right hand went to her mouth. “What’d your family do?”
“They passed the fucking cornbread.”
***
Roger and I had spent a lot of time together recently, discussing what life means and which parts matter and which don’t. I firmly believe lying to women is the same as lying to God—or the Great Whatever. I believed that then, and I still do. If this is true, Roger was lying to God when he told Eden he never thought about what had made him stop talking. Some days he didn’t think about it so much, but other times it was practically all he thought about.
Somewhere back in his childhood, he had been royally gypped—screwed out of eleven or twelve years of memories. He’d read enough books and seen enough movies to know you don’t simply lose those years; they exist somewhere, sealed in by scar tissue. But repressed-memory retrieval scared the beJesus out of Roger. He’d researched it. He knew when people did remember lost childhoods, the memories could not be trusted. These days thousands of wanna-be victims were clearly recalling horrible Satanic cults and baby sex-abuse experiences that hadn’t happened at all but were remembered anyway. What was the point of remembering unless you knew for certain the memory was true?
Not remembering held its own anxieties. On Maurey and Pud’s satellite television, he saw a movie called Sybil. It starred Sally Field as a girl with seventeen or eighteen personalities, and some of them didn’t like each other. The real Sybil would disappear for long periods of time while other girls with names like Erica or Judy lived in her body. For months after he saw the movie, Roger walked around expecting to turn into someone else. He imagined a jock named Bubba Joe would take over his body. Bubba Joe hated Roger and would try to kick him out of himself. Roger had trouble relaxing.
Then, last winter, the dreams began. They weren’t specific dreams; he wasn’t tied to the piano till he peed his pants the way Sally Field was. They were feelings dreams. Dreams where he was terrified and trapped. Great weights on his third-eye dreams. Or the rush of a roller-coaster drop. Flying a thousand miles an hour through space with no one to hold him.
By Easter, there was a man in his dream. A true villain with bad teeth, cracked lips, and a smell of rubbing alcohol. The man didn’t do anything; he just stood too close. Roger knew not to move when the man looked at him. He knew the pain was real. Roger woke up from the man dreams quivering, soaked in sweat, blood gushing from his nostrils like his brain had been skewered.
Smells triggered the dream feeling, even when he was awake. A blown-out match gave him a Freon feeling in his spine and stomach. Intense and terrific sadness. A dry well on the steam table at Dot’s Dine Out sent him into two days of spinning suicidal remorse. Suicide was the concrete fear. He was afraid he wasn’t the one in control of the question; that Bubba Joe or the dream man might make him do things he didn’t want to do. He was afraid if he remembered, he might go back to wherever he had come from.
***
I know all this because he talked to me about it. “Do you think it’s possible that a person can lose control over what they do?” Roger asked.
I tried to come up with the answer least likely to screw him up, and couldn’t, so I fell back on the truth. “I suppose so. Last summer, I lost my temper and rammed a pickup truck that went straight from a left-turn-only lane.”
“I mean more along the lines of having an alien take control of your body.”
One thing you have to give me is I always take whatever people say seriously. Others ignore the bizarre statement. Not me. “Like that guy in New York who said his dog made him murder random strangers?”
“The Son of Sam.”
“You can’t blame me for that one.”
“I’m wondering if irresistible acts are truly irresistible.”
I nodded. “You’re talking suicide.”
Roger pulled his bandanna down over his eyebrows.
I said, “A clinically depressed person might think he has no choice in the matter, but he does.”
“I’m thinking of the shattered personality.”
“You saw Three Faces of Eve.”
“Sybil.”
We were drinking brandy and coffee in Roger’s cabin. I came up whenever the pressure of living with a pack of females got to be too much. About once a day.
I said, “You’re afraid you might kill yourself?”
Roger crossed the room to put another stick in the woodstove. “I worry about psychological clutter making me do stuff I don’t want to do.”
“I could ask Shannon. She studied this in college.”
“Don’t ask Shannon.”
“She had a job at a mental hospital once. Nurse’s aide to the catatonics.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about me to Shannon.”
“I’d think you’d want expert advice if you’re really worried about losing control of yourself.”
“Nurse’s aide to catatonics doesn’t make Shannon an expert on suicide.”
***
On account of the not-talking thing and general spookiness, Maurey kept Roger out at the ranch his first year in Wyoming, so when he finally started GroVont Middle School he was older than the other kids in his class. He followed a year behind Auburn at Jackson Hole High. They rarely spoke to each other at school. Auburn was popular with the football and hockey crowd, while Roger kept to himself. Roger knew he embarrassed Auburn, and at first he enjoyed causing embarrassment, but soon the thrill wore off. Auburn’s senior year, the boys treated each other like the Hong Kong flu.
Auburn graduated and went on to the university at Laramie. Roger graduated and went back up the river. He wasn’t ready to take on the wide world quite yet, but he was also sick of feeding horses at 5 a.m. in below-zero weather. The only nonranch work on the upper Gros Ventre River was my Virgin Birth Home for Unwed Mothers at what had been the Bar Double R, a mile and a half upstream from the TM.
I had been bungling along, doing my own maintenance, and it was only dumb luck I hadn’t burned the place down. Gilia wasn’t any better. While she was brilliant when it came to decorating the lodge, if the generator went down, she was no more competent than me or the pregnant girls. Roger spent his post-graduation summer building himself a one-room cabin a couple hundred yards up the creek from the unwed mothers’ compound and moved in.
He liked it there, alone, with his jazz CDs, his woodstove, and my books. It was the ideal situation for a kid who wanted to avoid pavement.
Roger soon discovered his job came with perks. Virgin Birth housed from two to maybe six pregnant girls at a time. Some had babies, and some had abortions. A girl leaning toward an abortion was not roomed with a girl leaning toward having the baby. It might cause sadness. Most of the girls were sad, anyway, and some were flat miserable. Some cried for six months, until Roger thought the baby would grow up split, like Sybil. A few of the girls—at least one in each batch—had led creative, active sex lives before pregnancy and were in no rush to give it up. Since I practice monogamy with Gilia—we should stress that fact—by default, Roger became alpha male of the compound.
It started less than a month after Roger moved upriver. He’d been working on the kitchen-stove vents all afternoon, and in the evening, he took a shower in the main house, then walked to his cabin a
nd built a fire in the woodstove. Brother Jack McDuff wailed on the CD player. Pud had given Roger a left-handed Orfeus bass guitar for a graduation present. He’d set up a music stand to hold his book so he could pluck his bass and read at the same time. He was reading a novel he’d borrowed from me called The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. I collect books and have a huge library, but I haven’t read 10 percent of the books I own. I want them there on the shelves in case the road avalanches and I’m stuck at home for two decades. Roger read more of my books than I did. Fresh out of high school, Roger’s ambition in life was to sit by the stove, playing jazz bass lines and reading.
The Moviegoer was quite a good book, and Roger was as at peace as Roger ever got, when his door opened and Coffee Kennedy slipped in.
She said, “We need to talk.”
Roger said, “What about?”
Coffee was from New Mexico and pregnant with her second child. Her mother was raising the first, with no intention of taking on number two, so Coffee had been shipped to the Home. Coffee’s problem was she loved sex more than responsibility. Some people do. When Coffee slipped through Roger’s door, she was a woman on a mission.
The second girl didn’t even want copulation. Amelia said, “I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in a week.”
“What can I do to help?” Roger asked.
“Hold me.”
Roger stayed awake, holding Amelia all night while she slept with the innocence of a child. His arm was dead as day-old hamburger by morning, but Roger didn’t care. He’d had sex with a girl before; he’d never seen one sleep.
Tammy Lynn was eight months along and had a secret horseback fetish. When Tammy Lynn yelled, “Heigh-ho, Silver!” Roger fell off the back of Debra Winger, who stampeded across the field with the naked Tammy Lynn hanging on and laughing like a hysteria patient at a state mental institution.
Roger didn’t mind the girls sneaking into his cabin in the middle of the night. He looked forward to it. The girls who came after him were experienced, yet young and nimble. Since they were already pregnant and had been tested for disease, there were none of the usual fears that go with teen coupling. Roger was in the unique position—sex without consequences.
***
In May, Roger decided he needed even more privacy, so he built an outhouse down the hill from his cabin, away from the creek. The outhouse itself was no problem for a man with tools and know-how, but the outhouse hole was a different matter. It doesn’t take know-how to dig a hole on the upper Gros Ventre; it takes a strong fool with time on his hands. The site Roger chose was three inches of red dirt over a mountain of cobbled rocks put in place by glaciers and packed down by a million years of gravity.
Ten hours of pouring sweat in the high-altitude sun got Roger blisters on both hands and a four-foot hole in the ground, which was nowhere near deep enough for an outhouse. The next day he found an iron bar—called a pig sticker—in the toolshed and proceeded to smash the rocks rather than dig around them. At five feet, a salamander popped out of the hard-pack wall and fell down the back of Roger’s jeans. That brought him out of the hole in a hurry. He danced on the slag pile as the salamander slid down his leg and out the bottom where Roger stomped it.
The stomp came before thought, and Roger immediately regretted his action. He stood, hands on hips, unblinking, staring down at the squashed salamander. It had happened so quickly. Roger didn’t even remember jumping out of the pit. One moment he had a squirming thing in his jeans, and the next it was dead in the dirt. Roger’s boot print was impressed on the ground around the salamander with a little moon of waffle track on the head. The body looked plump and alive, but the head was flat as corrugated cardboard.
Roger picked up a baseball-sized rock and threw it hard as he could into the hole in disgust. He sat on the dirt pile, his hands now fists. The problem wasn’t so much that he killed the salamander—he hated killing animals, but you don’t grow up on a ranch without knowing how. The revulsion came from how quickly he’d killed. He’d had no time to choose. No premeditation. The deed had been beyond his control.
***
I found Roger sitting in the same spot on the dirt pile, only by the time I arrived, he’d buried the salamander and set up a cross made from chinking slats held together by a leather shoelace cord. Roger’s lips were moving, and as I leaned closer, I heard him whispering the poem that starts, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
“Odd choice of funeral prayer,” I said.
“Amen.” He glanced my way. “It’s the only prayer I know. Maurey taught it to me, back years ago when I used to have bedtime terrors.”
“You still have bedtime terrors.”
He nodded, more to himself than me. “I never like the ‘If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take’ part. Seems against the point of calming the child down to remind him every night that he might die in his sleep.”
I knelt to inspect how he’d tied the cord around the knot. A Boy Scout couldn’t have done better, but Roger had never been social enough to join Boy Scouts. “What was it?” I asked.
Twin tear tracks ran from the corners of Roger’s eyes, leaving worm-like trails in the dust on his face. “Salamander. Did you know they live underground? No light, no tunnel, I can’t figure out how he came to be where he was.”
“Did he have a name?”
Roger gave me a look to see if I was teasing. Of course I wasn’t. I don’t tease. “Not that I know of. He only lived a couple seconds after I freed him.”
“Then tell me this. Why are you so upset over the death of a salamander? Random animal empathy is fine, but if taken to extremes, it makes trivial the emotion you might need later when something personally tragic happens.”
Roger blinked twice and leaned over to pick up the shovel he’d used in the burial. “I killed it before I thought about killing it.” He paused, deciding how far he could go with frankness. “What if I’m built for violence? I don’t know my birth parents. They could be serial killers. God knows that would explain a lot.”
“Such as not talking, and the nightmares.”
“And killing helpless animals.”
***
We observed a minute of silence. Roger had always been somber, fairly detached, but he’d never come across as sad. He struck me as more consciously flat. A kid who played bass guitar alone. I knew there was something I should be saying—“You’re not bred to kill” or “Let a smile be your umbrella.” Everything I could think of came across as fatuous nonsense. He was right. A kid doesn’t stop speaking without a violent reason. The odds were high that he had been spawned from a bad seed. That didn’t mean he was doomed to badness. Where would I be if I bought the heredity-forms-us line?
So I said what I’d walked up the hill to say in the first place. “You know my mother, Lydia?”
Roger’s tore his eyes from the salamander grave. It turned out I’d said the right words to get him to move on. For most terrible thoughts, distraction beats introspection every time.
“We haven’t been introduced exactly. At the barbecue, she told me I was cooking with a dirty bandanna on my head, that I should show more pride in my appearance.”
“That’s Lydia.”
I stood and dusted dirt off my hands. “Lydia got pulled over Friday for not having brake lights.”
“That’s happened to me twice.”
“She refuses to get them fixed because it would be giving other drivers too much information.”
Roger said, “My fuse went out.”
“Yeah, well, Lydia’s driver’s license expired six years ago.”
“Isn’t she on parole?”
I leaned over to check the outhouse hole. It needed more depth. “Now she can’t drive, and she’s supposed to go down to Haven House this afternoon to record the oral history of this old-timer. He’s turning a hundred in August, and everyone expects h
im to die right after that, so they’re in a hurry.”
“Your mother should apply for a new license.”
“That’s what I said. In the meantime, she wants you to drive her to the interview.”
Roger looked over. “Why me?”
“You’ll get along better with Lydia if you don’t use the word why.”
“But she said my name? She said, ‘Get Roger’?”
I nodded again. “Sort of. I offered to come give her a ride, and she said to send the boy Maurey took in, the one who couldn’t talk when she lived here before.”
“I’ll have to clean up first. You want to finish my hole?”
I said, “The Earth will fill it back up in a few thousand years. I can’t see the point in digging a hole just to have it filled in again.”
Roger said, “It’s for my crap.”
***
Roger owned a ’79 Datsun pickup truck he paid thirty-five dollars for, even though it wasn’t worth that much. He called the truck Cindy and Cindy should have been ranch-bound. She wasn’t the sort you would take on asphalt if you had a choice. Lydia answered the door, barefoot, with her head cocked to the side as she slid a silver hoop into her right ear.
She saw Cindy out by the mailbox and said, “We’ll take my car.” Her BMW was actually older than Cindy and had more miles, but so far as Roger knew, it had steering, lights, and brakes. “You know how to drive a standard?” Lydia turned and walked back into the living room.
“Yes, ma’am.
Lydia stopped before a five-yard lineup of shoes—boots, sandals, slippers, running shoes, hiking shoes, lick-me heels, and pumps. Ever since she’d worn the same shoes as Oly, Lydia had been obsessed with footwear.
“Didn’t my son ever tell you what happens when people call me ma’am?”
“No, ma—”
Her voice rose into a scream. “I fly off the handle!”
Other than being loud enough to shake the windows, she didn’t look off the handle to Roger. She seemed calm, balanced on her left leg, slipping her right foot into a squared-off, black high heel with straps that went well with her black tights and blood red cowboy shirt.
