by Tim Sandlin
Lydia licked her spoon dry. “Sam, sometimes the inanity of your conversation astounds me. Do you sit in the bathtub at night and make lists of stupid remarks?”
“It’s an acceptance-of-age thing. Haven’t you ever had to accept that you aren’t going to do something that you always, in the back of your mind, thought you would one day do, if only you lived long enough?”
“No.”
A white-capped sparrow sat on the windowsill, looking in at us. Lydia dipped her fingertips in tea and flipped a spray of drops on the window, directly at the bird. The bird did not flinch.
Lydia said, “So I am to infer that in the back of your mind you always thought you would sleep with Linda Ronstadt.”
“When I was young I thought sooner or later I would sleep with everyone. And now I know I’m not.”
“We must notify Linda.”
“It isn’t simply because I’m monogamous with Gilia. I’ve been monogamous before, lots of times. But back then I assumed eventually the women would leave me and I’d be single again.”
“Monogamy doesn’t count if you assume it’s temporary.”
“But now, as I’ve grown old, I see that everything you choose to do means giving up a bunch of other things you thought you might do later. Monogamy with Gilia means never sleeping with Linda Ronstadt.”
“I hope to hell you don’t try to pass this off as deep thought.”
We were having this discussion in the end booth of Dot’s Dine Out, which was no longer owned by Dot. She sold the diner to a stock analyst named Garth, who thought feeding rural types was the equivalent of the simple life. No one expected him to last a year. Meanwhile, Dot bought a condo in Mesquite, Nevada, to be near her son who was in a halfway house for cult refugees.
“Dot would never leave customers sitting out here for an eternity,” Lydia said. “She knew the meaning of the word service.”
“Garth likes to get things right.”
“Garth is going to get me right over to the Dairy Queen. I have to pick up potting soil at the hardware store before they close.”
“That’s hours from now.”
“Yes, but there might be a run on potting soil.” Lydia drained her tea in a single long draw. “I always thought I would be an Olympic swimmer.”
“You don’t swim.”
Lydia gave me a look.
“I mean, I’ve never seen you swim.”
“I was quite the mermaid back in junior high, before I had a baby.”
“Another career you sacrificed for me. How many does that make?”
“I still might pick up swimming someday, when I find the time. That’s the difference between you and I.”
“You and me.”
“You’ve given up on Linda Ronstadt, but I haven’t given up on swimming in the Olympics. You have accepted the aging process.”
“I act what I am, and you don’t.”
“You act older than that fossil out at Haven House. He’s still plotting to run away to Greece with his girlfriend.” Her voice rose in a shriek. “How long can it take to cook a cheeseburger, for God’s sake!”
“Mom, calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when you bury me.”
***
I had been having a lot of trouble with sanity of late. It started with waking up in the morning to a tidal wave of formless grief, as if getting up was the most difficult and useless thing a human could do. Then I would be okay through coffee and a bagel, sometimes I pulled off the morning till lunch with Gilia, but early afternoon brought the full range of ennui sliding into malaise and across to overwhelming fatigue.
It embarrassed me no end that others seemed to go along in the day-by-day sameness of routine without screaming or rending their flesh. I didn’t scream in public, or anywhere else, for that matter, and I wasn’t totally certain what rending of flesh entailed, exactly. Yet I was often overcome with an almost but not quite irresistible urge to poke out the eyes of perfectly nice people.
I lived then, and I still live now, by a strict personal code. When an acquaintance, or even a good friend, stops you on the street and says, “How you doing?” the man holding up his end of civilization lies. He says, “Terrific! And you?” to which the acquaintance or friend replies, “Never been better.” Small talk—lies—holds society together. Without it, everyone would act like they lived in New York.
I had a wife I loved and two children. I had enough money to live where I wanted to live and do what I wanted to do. I was insuranced. I did good for the world, in the form of my home for unwed mothers, and I had a creative outlet, in the novels. I even had a poem accepted by the Kansas Quarterly, although the editor who liked it died, and the new editor sent me a contributor’s copy but never published the poem. So what was the matter? Why did I need to poke eyes out simply because people acted as if I were invisible?
I had heard of a disease where the sick person cannot help but shout Cocksucker in inappropriate situations. When I was younger, I felt this disease was awfully convenient and could probably be cured with a buzzer. But now, I was starting to understand. I was dangerously close to bad behavior in public myself; I just hadn’t decided what form it should take.
No one knew I was walking the tightrope, or at least I thought no one knew. Maybe they all knew. I imagined Gilia and Maurey talking about me when I wasn’t around. “He’s been hanging on by a thread for years,” Maurey says. Gilia says, “He likes it that way.” Then they would go back to comparing Star Wars to The Empire Strikes Back.
Recently, I had been trying to come up with a socially acceptable way to explode. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, especially Gilia, so running off with a woman twenty years younger than me was out of the question. I had long since given up on the sport screw. And I didn’t want to retreat into drugs and alcohol. I had too much experience to think knocking yourself stupid avoided depression. Suicide was not an alternative. Life may be hell, but at least it was interesting. It might get better. From what I could see, death rarely gets better. I was looking for a form of pragmatic insanity. A way to be taken seriously without breaking anything that can’t be fixed.
An hour after our lunch at Dot’s, Lydia gave a lesson in how it’s done.
***
What happened was Lydia walked down to Zion Hardware for her potting soil. She spent a few minutes comparing nutrients on the various bags, then explained to Corinthia Knudsson the best way to clean pine tar off overalls, not that Lydia had ever cleaned pine tar off overalls, but Corinthia looked so pitiful standing there in the aisle, lost among the choices of cleaning products, that Lydia felt the poor woman needed help.
Lydia said, “Lighter fluid and ashes—woodstove ashes work better than cigarette, but use what you have.”
Corinthia thanked her and bought lighter fluid. Lydia told Dave Peters if his dog crapped in her yard one more time, she would castrate it. Dave promised his dog would not crap in her yard again, and Lydia said, “See that he doesn’t.”
She arrived at the checkout stand feeling pretty good about the whole thing. She was part of her community. People knew her and paid attention when she spoke. It beat the heck out of lock-up.
Levi Mohr had spent one semester at BYU and now was working in his father’s hardware store while he waited to go on his mission. He had no idea who Lydia was or what she represented.
“Three dollars, fifteen cents,” he said. As Lydia dug though her purse for correct change, Levi added, “I gave you the senior discount.”
Lydia leaned across the potting soil and pulled the cash register off the counter. It missed Levi’s foot, which was the only good luck he had that day. Instead the cash register hit the floor with an awesome crash. Lydia swept aside a glass cookie jar filled with donations for the Class of ’93 Senior Trip, then she toppled the blank-key rack, sending hundreds of keys over the key-cutter machine and a
cross the floor.
Levi jumped her from behind, pinning her arms. She screamed, stomped his instep, and gave him an elbow in the balls that pretty much took the fight out of the boy. Lydia lit into an aisle of Coleman lanterns, stoves, and camping paraphernalia, then she turned to the power tools. Drills rained like hail in May.
At that point, Lydia stopped screaming and concentrated on destruction. A silent crowd stayed out of her way as she worked through gardening and automotive. On aisle two, she picked up a hickory ax handle that made the glass doors on the socket set display a piece of cake. The sheriff’s department arrived between kitchens and dinette sets. There were three of them. The two rookies were at a total loss, and if the situation had been left to them, eventually they would have shot her, but Mangum Potter, who had been around GroVont longer than even Lydia, knew what to do.
He said, “Lydia, you’ve made your point.”
Lydia stopped in mid-backswing and looked over at Mangum, then back at her swath of destruction. Her posture went wimbly, and she sobbed once. As the law closed in, Lydia threw the ax handle through eight settings of Fiestaware. Then she gave up.
***
Three years earlier, Lydia Callahan and Hank Elkrunner had been living in a converted sheep wagon in the bowels of Canyon de Chelly, a couple miles beyond the White House ruins. Lydia drove their cherry red Ford F-1 pickup truck into Chinle to the post office to pick up her contributor’s copy of Harper’s Bazaar. She complimented the girl at the window on her turquoise bracelet and the girl burst into tears. Some fugitives would have been tipped off by this show of emotion, but Lydia was busy checking to see if Harper’s spelled her name right and didn’t notice the four agents until one of them said, “Lydia Callahan.”
Lydia screamed, “Rape!” and ran into the women’s room. One agent came out with a cat scratch across his nose, and another pulled his weapon for the first time in a thirty-year career. The Navajo postal workers and patrons formed a silent double line from the women’s room door to the waiting FBI Chrysler. Fearing an insurrection, the FBI called the Park Service for backup, but in the end, Lydia was taken without incident. There was a photo run by the Reuters news service of Lydia standing in the harsh New Mexico sunlight wearing shorts and a halter top, her hair in braids and one fist raised to the sky in defiance.
Lydia was quoted as saying, “I will flee no more forever.”
Her article in Harper’s Bazaar was entitled “Ageism in the Feminist Movement.” It was written in response to the new president of NOW, who’d called Lydia a fringe dinosaur. The FBI got hold of the magazine and gave it some high-tech radium bath, followed it through four safe mailboxes, and was waiting when Lydia arrived at the post office on that March morning of 1990.
Most of Lydia’s family, and that included me, Maurey, and Shannon, believed quite firmly that if Lydia had kept her mouth shut, the FBI and Secret Service would not have even been looking for her. But she made herself such a high-profile fugitive that they had to track her down and prosecute. It wasn’t just Harper’s. Lydia wrote scores of “Nonnie, nonnie, can’t-catch-me” articles. She wrote so many letters to the editor that they were collected into a book called Notes from the Underground. It wasn’t a bestseller, but every review used the term cult following. Lydia always did want a cult following.
***
Gilia answered the phone on the third ring. She held the receiver so Esther could hear the conversation, but Esther was more interested in eating an earring.
Gilia said, “What?”
She listened a few moments and became just distracted enough for Esther to hook a finger in the earring and pull. “Ouch!” Gilia yelped. She said into the phone, “No, not you. My ear.”
She listened a few more moments, then hung up.
She found me in the library with Eden Rae and Honor, where we were going over Eden’s release documents. I was explaining blind adoptions.
“These papers say I can’t tell you where the baby goes, and when he or she gets old enough to come looking, I can’t tell him or her who you are.”
Eden didn’t comment. The process depressed her no end.
“Of course,” I went on, “laws change. What’s right and legal now may not be right and legal in twenty years. There’s always the chance of this child showing up on your door, so I would advise against keeping secrets from your future husband.”
Eden said, “Future husband, my ass.”
Gilia interrupted from the doorway. “The sheriff called. Your mother trashed Zion Hardware.”
I looked up from the papers. “Trashed?”
“Mangum says a bomb would have been more delicate.”
“Jesus,” Eden said. “You come from a violent family.”
Gilia said, “He wants you down there right away. Says he’ll have to stun gun her if she doesn’t mellow out.”
Rather than bolting down to the sheriff’s office to save my mom from the stun gun, I made a side trip to Zion Hardware, in hopes of saving her from far worse. Owen Mohr and I discussed inventory and Levi’s long-term trauma. Owen inflated prices a bit, but considering the state of his store, he was decent about the matter; Owen took pride in being a good businessman, not a gouger. He arrived at a number, I wrote a check, and we shook hands, all without lawyers. Things like that still happen in small towns.
I found Lydia in the women’s holding cell. She sat folded on the floor with her back against the wall, her knees up under her chin and her arms around her legs. Brandy Epstein was lowering the parole-officer boom. “I hope you enjoyed your little tantrum, Mrs. Elkrunner, because it is going to cost you two years.”
Lydia had shut down. She gave no sign of knowing where she was, much less who was talking and what was being threatened. She had disappeared into the zone known only by those who have served time. Her face was gone.
Brandy turned on me. “I have to revoke her.”
I said, “Owen Mohr isn’t pressing charges.”
Brandy stared hard at me for longer than I was comfortable being stared at by a parole officer. “How much did it cost you?”
I met her eyes straight on. “Eleven thousand.”
She blinked. She turned back to look down at Lydia on the floor. Lydia gave no indication she had heard the exchange.
“Okay,” Brandy said, “but the party segment of our relationship is over. I want her in my office every Monday, eight a.m. If she’s two minutes late, she goes on report.”
“She’ll be there.”
“And no more goldbricking the community service. She owes me five hundred hours, and so far she’s given me four. From now on, if that old man craps, I want her there to change his diaper.”
“Why are you taking this so personally?” I asked. “She made a mistake. The only one she’s hurting is herself.”
Brandy walked over to Lydia and stood closer than she should have. “Too many kids come through my office who can’t buy their way out of trouble. It pisses me off when someone can.”
Brandy walked out of the cell. I crossed over and touched Lydia’s shoulder. “Let’s go home, Mom.”
9
Maurey Pierce lay on her belly with her right eye screwed up against the spotting scope. Beside her, on the blanket, she had arranged a pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars, a Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds, and a silver thermos of black coffee.
She spoke slowly, scanning a marshy pond at the bottom of the slope. “Cinnamon teal, a ring-necked, a couple types of goldeneyes. There’s a heron in that aspen by the inlet.”
Roger tugged his bandanna low over his eyebrows. “Busy little pond.”
“Springtime in the Rockies.” Maurey cupped her left hand over her left eye, trying to ease the squint pressure. “We had a pair of trumpeters nest in here last year. I was hoping they’d come back.” She swiveled the scope to the right. “There’s a coyote on the ridge.�
�
“Where?”
Maurey pointed out what looked to Roger like a tan rock. He picked up the binoculars and focused in on the coyote.
Maurey said, “Every female down there is either about to or has dropped in the last few days. In the wild, copulation stops once the female gets pregnant.”
“I didn’t know copulation stops.”
“There’s no point if she’s already knocked up.” She glanced over to see if Roger caught the drift, but he was busy pulling a book from his day pack.
He said, “You ever read this?”
Maurey checked out the cover. “I tried once. The man wrote it used to live on Ditch Creek.”
“Did you know him?”
Maurey returned her attention to the spotting scope. “I pulled him out of a snowbank when he got stuck. As I recall, he wasn’t much of a winter driver.”
“What’d you think of the book?”
“Jesus, what is that in the reeds? All these female ducks look the same.” She adjusted the focus again. “It was one of those books spends three hundred pages making you love a person, then the writer kills him and you’re supposed to cry and think the book was wonderful. I saw where it was headed and bailed out.”
“The baby disappears in the end. He doesn’t die.”
“His mama does. Sam told me the ending. He thinks this Loren Paul was hot stuff before he went off to Hollywood. Sam took it as a personal insult the guy would rather be rich than sensitive.”
Roger unscrewed the thermos and poured an inch of coffee into the lid. “Lydia thinks the book is about me.”
Maurey kind of froze in position, like she was holding her breath, even though she wasn’t.
“She thinks I’m the kid—Buggie or Fred or whatever his name is.”
Maurey turned her head toward Roger. He sipped coffee, not looking at her, pretending to be casual. Maurey said, “Did Lydia explain why she thinks you’re a boy in a novel?”
“She says it’s a memoir, which is a novel, only true. And she thinks the pieces fit, so it could be me.” Roger sneaked a look at Maurey. She seemed okay, not threatened or anything. If his more or less adoptive son was nosing around for birth parents, it would make him nervous, but Maurey seemed untroubled. “Tell me about the woman who brought me to the ranch.”
