by Tim Sandlin
“Three, now Oly’s coming with us.”
I poured boiling water over the grounds. “What’s in it for Lydia?”
Roger gave the question some thought while I pushed the screen through the liquid and onto the soggy grounds—cowboy coffee you don’t chew. Neither one of us believed my mother was capable of committing an act of goodness, for the sake of itself. Roger was young and I’m idealistic, but he wasn’t that young and I’m not that idealistic.
“Perverse curiosity,” Roger said. “She read the book in prison when she had time on her hands, and she thinks she’s figured out the unsolved mystery. She wants to see if she’s right.”
I poured the coffee into two mugs I got free for contributing to public radio. “That’s possible, but Lydia is not a basket you want to put all your eggs in.”
Roger dribbled milk into both mugs. “I don’t think of Lydia as an egg basket.”
“She’s as likely to ditch you at a rest stop as not. She did it to me once when I was little. She claimed she thought I was asleep in the backseat.”
Roger lifted his cup and sipped. “You don’t trust your mother.”
“Not for a second.”
Dawn found Leroy folded inside a cardboard KitchenAid refrigerator box under a boulevard overpass on the south fringe of Trinidad, Colorado. He slid from the box and walked barefoot across gravel and glass to a Speed Limit 35 sign, where he unzipped and peed, leaning his forehead against the post, scratching a Z-shaped scar over his liver. A vehicle bigger than a station wagon but smaller than a bread truck rolled down the four-lane street. Some newfangled rig that had come out while he was in Bogotá. The car—or whatever it was—lights swept across Leroy as it pulled into a Zippy Mart parking lot. A man in a hard hat and a down vest got out and went inside.
Leroy stepped out of the shorts. Naked, he sniffed the crotch, then turned them inside out and put them back on with the pockets flapping on his thighs like wing pouches. He spit a substance solid enough to bounce. He stuck a finger back where his upper molars used to be, and dug a food morsel from between his gums and cheek. The hard hat came from the Zippy Mart, slapping a pack of Tareytons against his forearm, got back into his boxy vehicle, and drove away. It was bright enough now the man didn’t turn his headlights back on.
Leroy needed coffee. He’d learned to live without what most others considered necessities if he had to, but he’d never come to terms with a morning without coffee.
***
An electronic beeper buzzed when Leroy entered the Zippy Mart. It was empty except for an underweight girl with cropped neon hair and a roofing nail in her cheek, sitting behind the counter, reading a Silver Surfer comic. Leroy had seen the weird hair and body spikes in Venice Beach, but he hadn’t realized the style had reached Colorado.
She glanced up at him and snapped her bubble gum. “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”
“What’s that mean?” Leroy crossed to a coffee urn and poured coffee into a huge cup. Must have held a quart.
The girl bobbed her nail at a sign next to the smokeless-tobacco display cutout of a cowboy. No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. Another sign read: We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Premenstrual Women.
“Normally, I wouldn’t go anal on you, but my boss will be along soon, to get the night deposit, and he’ll fire my butt if you’re hanging out in here like that.”
Leroy chugged a fair portion of coffee, then he refilled his cup.
The girl said, “I like your tattoo.”
Leroy picked up a packet of buffalo jerky, aerosol deodorant, and a box of Red Hots and walked to the cash register.
The girl seemed mesmerized by his flaming-babies tattoo. She said, “Why are your shorts on inside out?”
“Other side is dirty.”
She nodded and said, “Oh.” She was wearing acid-washed Levi’s with silver pocket studs and a Zippy Mart uniform shirt that was pale pink with thin red stripes. A card pinned to her breast read Z.
“What’s Z?” Leroy asked.
“Zelda. They screwed up my name tag, and now I’m Z. Listen, Mister, you can keep the coffee ’cause you already drank it, but I can’t sell you the other stuff.”
Leroy looked from the jerky to Zelda’s eyes, swollen that pink puffiness you see on people who work night shifts. She had an acne rash around the spike and what might have been a hickey on her neck, over the tonsils. She looked like a dropout.
“Give me your shirt,” Leroy said.
“Are you squirrelly?”
He enunciated each word, leaning into her face. “Take your shirt off and give it to me.”
Zelda blinked. Twice. “What about the shoe rule?”
“I’ll take them too.”
Zelda popped her gum thoughtfully, while Leroy waited. He had become an accomplished waiter, the last few years. Before Bogotá, he would have taken what he wanted, walked out, and risked her calling the cops.
Zelda fingered her top button. “I don’t know what my boss will say. He’s Church of Christ.”
“He will thank you for following the law.” Leroy leaned farther over the counter to check her shoes—low-rider tennies without laces. No doubt too small. When he looked back up, Zelda stood there with her shirt wadded in her hand. She wore a red lacy bra that covered her nipples and the undermoon of her breasts.
“Do you live in Las Animas County?” she asked.
The shirt stretched across Leroy’s back, but so long as he didn’t bother with buttons, it was functional.
When he didn’t answer, Zelda went on, “I just wondered if you’re from here. I get off soon. We could go to my place and smoke weed. My mom and dad will have gone to work by the time I come home.”
Leroy tipped his Styrofoam cup and drank till black liquid dribbled off his chin. “Not me.” He set the jerky, deodorant, coffee, and Red Hots on the counter, then he pulled a bag of Planters nuts from a wire rack next to a magnet display with sayings like Born to Fish and Honk If You’re Horny. “Get me a pack of Lucky Strikes.”
When Zelda turned to find the cigarettes, Leroy swiped a lighter. “That’ll be eight fifty-three,” she said.
He dug into the pocket, which was awkward, it being on the outside his shorts, and drew out the filthy fiver he’d been holding on to since California. “This is close as I can come.”
She looked him in the eye and gave a twitch of a wink. “Maybe we could trade up for the rest.”
“Maybe you could bag my stuff and call it even.” He stuck the five in his outside back pocket, behind the lighter. “What was that you said about a night deposit?”
13
Lydia tore open the packaging on an alcohol-prep gauze strip and threw both the packaging and the alcohol strip into the garbage. She unscrewed the top of her plastic cup, entered the one and only stall, turned, and dropped her jeans and panties. Brandy Esptein had explained in graphic detail the secrets of the clean catch, as if Lydia had never been to a doctor in her life, never peed in a cup.
“Wipe the area thoroughly with the sterile pad, then urinate for two seconds, stop, hold the cup in its position, and resume your urination.”
Lydia said, “Yeah, right.”
Lydia had no intention of giving a clean catch. In her experience, a clean catch only applied to the urine in the cup. There was nothing clean about the urine on her fingers, her thighs, the toilet lid. What kind of person lets go for two seconds, then stops? A desperately ill person, maybe, searching for solace in a medical test. Not a convicted felon pissing for the amusement of her rabid parole officer.
So Lydia skipped the start, stop, start again. She splattered anyway, and the cup came dangerously close to overflowing. She’d been late leaving the house after lunch, and the fear Brandy would write her up for lack of punctuality made her hurry when she should have used the can. She exited the stall, balancing the cup carefully
, and crossed to the sink to wash her hands. Before screwing the lid on the plastic cup full of wheat-colored liquid, she spit in it.
She said, “Analyze that.”
Back in Brandy’s office, Lydia found Brandy typing away on a computer the size of a small car. Lydia resisted the terrible temptation to spill on the computer or Brandy’s lap or both. She needed cooperation today, and a spillage wasn’t the way to get it.
Lydia set the urine cup on the edge of Brandy’s desk. “Did you ever stop to think this is a sick way to make a living?” Lydia said. “The essence of your existence is other people’s wee-wee.”
Brandy glanced up from her computer. She was wearing a home-knit sweater—no doubt a gift from a relative with too much time on her hands—and chewing gum. “Did you happen to look around during your visit to the powder room?”
“Your facilities need a good cleaning, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did you take note of the video camera? Should you bring in substitute urine or add foreign liquid to the collection cup, I will know.”
“You not only get your jollies playing with my number one, you also watch me do it?”
Brandy stopped typing and focused her attention on Lydia. “Let me assure you, nothing in our relationship gives me jollies.” Brandy swiveled in her chair, opened a two-drawer file cabinet, and pulled out, presumably, Lydia’s paperwork.
“How did we get from GroVont to Jackson today?” Brandy asked.
“My son drove me in the company van. I don’t know how you got here.”
Brandy squinted at the paper. “You only have the one son?”
“Sam’s sitting outside, or he’s probably gone over to that new coffee place on the square. Sam loves yuppie coffeehouses. Makes him feel like he’s somewhere else.”
Brandy clicked her pen open and wrote in the file. “There’s a rumor going around that you’ve been seen driving.”
“You’re new here, Brandy, so maybe you don’t know. Rumors in this valley are all lies. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve had said about me to my face. One shudders to think of the wild accusations locals make behind my back.”
Brandy touched the tip of her pen to her ear, which was encircled by a whorl of new penny-colored hair, sprayed stiff against the Wyoming wind. To Lydia’s astute eye, Brandy seemed to be choosing her battles.
She chose to pass on this one. “Just keep in mind, you have no license.”
“How could I forget when you remind me twice a week?”
Brandy pretended to ignore Lydia while she entered information into Lydia’s paperwork. It must have been quite a bit of information, because the scratchy-pen silence stretched out past Lydia’s comfort zone. Even though she knew Brandy was faking distraction, Lydia could not tolerate being ignored on any terms.
“Aren’t you going to ask how many bombs I purchased recently?” Lydia asked.
Brandy didn’t look up. “How many bombs have you purchased?”
“None,” Lydia said. “I did, however, file a discarded toothbrush into a serviceable shiv. I learned a lot about the making of shivs, in the big house. You can manufacture one out of practically anything. I had a cellmate who turned a tampon tube into such a weapon she could have skewered an entire Brownie troop, like shish-kebabbed onions.”
Lydia leaned forward, trying to catch Brandy’s eye but failing. “She would have too. Shish-kebabbed a Brownie troop. If they were white. The woman hated with an intensity you don’t normally find in the general population. The two of you would have made the greatest of friends, had you but known one another.”
Brandy sniffed. Lydia tugged a Kleenex from the box on the desk between the computer and her clean catch. She passed the Kleenex across to Brandy, who blew into it, making a sound not unlike a kazoo with a mute on the tip hole, and said, “How much progress have we made with the oral history?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
Brandy finally looked up at Lydia across the Kleenex wad. “Don’t even dream you can wriggle your way out of this.”
“Of course not.”
“Just so you understand reality.”
Lydia took that a couple different ways before she went on. “I know your heart is hardened where I am concerned. We got off to a bad start.”
“My heart hasn’t softened since then,” Brandy said.
Lydia oozed a low sigh. “I am resigned to completing the oral history, but the challenge is doing it by Oly Pedersen Day.” She stared at the crease in Brandy’s forehead. Lydia had been lying for over fifty years, and she was good at it. She knew intense eye contact is met with as much suspicion as none at all. You have to fake eye contact in order to gain trust. Focus should be on the eyebrows, only Brandy’s eyebrows had been plucked to oblivion, so instead Lydia made contact with the vertical fold running through Brandy’s third eye.
“Oly hasn’t left out a detail since birth. We’re stuck in the Great War, and at this rate, by August, when Oly celebrates his happy hundredth, he and I shall be mired in the Depression.”
Brandy’s eyelids narrowed and flattened—the sign of doubt. “I’m not going to tell him to skip decades, not for your convenience.”
“I wouldn’t hear of it.” Lydia smiled, which only increased the doubt. “Oly’s life has been a fascinating journey. We must record every pothole in the road, for posterity.” Lydia saw she was spreading it a bit thick. She’d have to flash cynicism or Brandy would never buy the bottom line.
“Let’s face the ugly facts,” Lydia said. “The troll may flatline at any moment, and you, being a sadistic government flunky, would make me start over on some new codger.”
Brandy blinked. Lydia came off as so much more truthful when she insulted than when she talked posterity. “What’s your point, Mrs. Elkrunner?”
Lydia didn’t rise to the Elkrunner bait. “My point is, we should concentrate the sessions. With your permission, I want to take Mr. Pedersen out of Haven House over Memorial Day weekend. I want to bring him into my home, install him in my son’s old bedroom. In three days of taping, we could finish this odious chore and I could get on with my rehabilitation before the turning of the millennium.”
Lydia stood up, for emphasis. She nested her fingers on both sides of the urine cup. “I want to become a Goddamn model citizen, and it’ll never happen at two hours a Goddamn week.”
Lydia sat back down with a plop. She said, “So to speak.”
Brandy didn’t budge.
Lydia said, “As it were.”
Brandy tapped her government-issue pen on the desktop.
Lydia said, “In point of fact.”
***
“That woman embodies every cliché circulated about people from Philadelphia.”
I fidgeted with the tiny spoon that came on a tiny saucer with my cappuccino. It was similar to a coke spoon owned by my distant first wife, way back in another world. Once every year or so, I wondered what had become of her.
“Is Brandy from Philadelphia?”
“How should I know? My point is that she embodies the clichés, not that she ever lived there. As a matter of course, I heard her people came out of Delaware or Vermont or someplace. One of those minute Yankee states that would fit in Yellowstone Park.”
Wanda was my other wife’s name. It took a moment to come up with it. “I’m not certain Vermont fits in Yellowstone. Maybe you’re thinking of Connecticut.”
“We are not discussing small states, Sam. I’m telling you what a tight twat Brandy Epstein is.”
“That must be a cliché I missed. The one about women from Philadelphia having tight…you-knows.”
“Twat, Sam. It’s a perfectly good word. Far more specific than you knows.”
My mother and I were drinking fancy coffees on the deck of a new place called Cowpoke Grinders. Outdoor dining was new for Jackson, Wyomin
g, where snow covers the ground seven months of the year and it’s too cold to eat outside four of the other five.
The moment Lydia had seen the place, she’d ripped the name. “Cow poke is obscene, Sam. The mental picture it conjures is horrendous. And matched with Grinders? I shudder to think what nightmares I shall have tonight.”
Then she ripped the latte I bought her.
“What is this?”
“Latte. They’re popular these days.”
She sniffed the lip of the cup. “It smells like a concoction the Navajos brewed down in Canyon de Chelly.”
“I’ve heard Native Americans invented the latte,” I said, not meaning it.
“My friends didn’t drink the stuff. They poured it in cracks to kill spiders. And Indians hate the term Native American. They would go apoplectic around any tourist who dared use it.”
“Writers like me call that reverse political correctness.”
“Red Mesa High School is the home of the Redskins. How’s that for reverse political correctness?”
Before I could react, Lydia went on to rip Brandy Epstein—the Philadelphia-cliché thing. So now we’re back where we started.
“She’s an idiot, in the bad sense of the word.”
Typical of Lydia to think idiot came in more than one sense. “Did she give the okay to take Oly Pedersen?”
Lydia sipped latte and pressed her lips primly together. She seemed to enjoy the drink, in spite of comparing it to spider poison. “Finally.” She blew air on the first syllable. “But only after I stuck my tongue up her fat side.”
The mental picture was disturbing, far worse than cow poke. “Is that literal?”
Lydia cocked her head to look at me, as if in a new light. “Sam. You have multiple flaws, as we know, but in my opinion, the greatest flaw of them all is this tendency to fake stupidity.”
“Sometimes I’m not faking.”
“See. You’re still doing it.” Finished with sizing me up, she looked back down at her hands on her latte. “Brandy said only the hours the microphone is turned on and Oly is speaking count as community service. She said I’m not being paid to baby-sit.”
