Lydia

by Tim Sandlin

  Irene gave Lydia a look of exasperation. “Oly hasn’t been with a gal since then. I didn’t say a word about me.”

  Meanwhile Roger had been doing the math. “That would mean Oly was seventy-eight when you guys did it.”

  Irene said, “Seventy-seven.”

  “Either way is impressive,” Roger said.

  Irene propped her free hand, the hand not holding the notebook, on Oly’s bald head. “It was nothing to brag about. Oly started something he couldn’t finish.”

  Lydia said, “Thank you for sharing.”

  Ellis scratched his head above the ear, making his comb-over swirl like a tumbleweed. “That still doesn’t make you next of kin.”

  Irene rubbed a glove across Oly’s head affectionately. “Wyoming had common-law marriage back then. Legally speaking, we were man and wife, at least for a day, and he hasn’t been man and wife with anybody since, so I’m the closest he’s got to kin.”

  “Let me look at this law.” Ellis took the notebook from Irene. He studied it, while the others waited in various levels of patience.

  “I don’t see anything about common-law marriage here.”

  “Everyone knows common law.” Irene snatched the notebook back. “I simply researched the statutes that say she can’t take him without a relative’s permission. Even if I’m not next of kin, you’ll have to find someone who is.”

  Lydia pulled the keys from her pocket and jingled them in Roger’s direction. “This is a farce. Roger, put Mr. Pedersen in the car and his chair in the trunk.”

  Roger moved to lift Oly by the shoulders.

  Irene said, “I’ll sue if you do.”

  Lydia swung around on Ellis, who was wishing he hadn’t gotten out of bed today. “Ellis,” she said, “are you going to let yourself be bullied by this woman?”

  Ellis was smart enough to know whatever he did, he was letting himself be bullied by a woman, so he chose to cover his butt. “When it comes to lawsuits, I strongly feel it is better to err on the side of caution.”

  “You are cautious as a mouse,” Lydia said.

  Oly’s head moved side to side in small jerks. Remember that scene in Wizard of Oz where the Tin Man comes to after the oil fix. That’s what it was. An awakening of rusted joints.

  He spoke. “Irene.”

  Irene said, “Don’t bother yourself, Oly. I will protect you from this vixen.”

  Oly said, “I haven’t been off this plot of land in six years.”

  He kind of lost the drift of his thoughts then, watching a pair of ravens fight over a diaper they’d pulled from the Haven House Dumpster.

  Lydia said, “And?”

  Oly’s focus returned. “When they brought me to this place, I was told I would never leave till the day I died. Do you know what that feels like, to walk into a building, knowing it’s the last one? You may never leave.”

  “I had a cell mate with that problem,” Lydia said.

  Irene put the tips of her white-gloved fingers together. “I don’t know how it feels, Oly. They allow me to attend church on Sundays with my niece.”

  “They don’t let me go off anywhere, until now,” Oly said.

  He lifted himself from the chair and walked, bent but steady, to the car. Roger opened the backseat door. Oly ignored the boy. He opened the front-passenger door, turned around, and lowered himself into the seat with his legs still outside, his feet on the driveway pavement.

  “I’ll be back Monday,” Oly said.

  “Are you certain that is what you want?” Irene asked.

  Oly used both hands to haul his legs into the car. Then he turned, face forward, staring out the windshield, back in the passive mode.

  Irene latched on to Lydia’s rotator cuff. “You’d best bring him back in the same condition you took him.”

  Lydia pried Irene’s fingers loose. “My God, Irene, he’s not a rug shampooer.”

  “Just you bring my Oly back. Alive.”

  16

  After Armistice, I had nowhere to go and no reason to do anything or not do anything else, so I volunteered to invade Russia. Most Americans don’t have a notion about that war. When I tell them, they say I’m making up a tall tale, but the fact is Americans, British—with Canadians and Australians—and a few French went in through Finland, while more Canadians, Americans, and Japanese landed in Siberia. Our purpose was to save the royalist white Russians from the Bolsheviks. The hitch: after the horrible deprivations during the war to end all wars, nobody had the enthusiasm to jump right into another one. The politicians couldn’t drum up support from a worn-down populace, and the soldiers didn’t have the spine for defending one bunch of Russians from another bunch of Russians. President Wilson hated the Tsar and backed up Lenin, till Lenin started winning. Now, it was the other way round. Our soldiers didn’t buy it.

  So, a year later, the North Russian Expedition gave up, but meanwhile me and Shad decided to go see the Baltic. At the last moment, before the train pulled out for Finland, Bill yanked some strings and came with us. Bill always had a talent for yanking strings. He said he wanted a crack at Bolo girls. My belief is Bill couldn’t handle the thought of losing Shad.

  You’d assume I spit in Bill’s eye and shunned his presence, after all he’d done, but by the end of the Great War, I was too hollowed out. I didn’t have the juice to maintain hatred. I’d had time to think in the convalescent hospital in Ireland, and I’d come to the conclusion that Agatha would have written that letter even if Bill hadn’t told her about Swamp Fox. The thing Agatha loathed most was boredom, and the thing she wanted most was romance, as evidenced by her pleasure in poetry. I don’t know if poetry bred romance or romance bred poetry. All I know for certain is that Agatha was not a girl to sit in her daddy’s house in Billings, Montana, waiting for a man. The one virtue she never displayed was patience.

  And besides, I had wallowed with a syphilitic whore. Bill did too, and his motive for telling on me was selfish, but that didn’t change the facts. I wallowed. The consequences were mine, not Bill’s. So, while I didn’t cozy up with Bill Cox in North Russia, neither did I punch him in the face. Compare it to playing on a baseball team where the pitcher is a heel. You still play with him. You just don’t tell him secrets.

  As to the incursion, there’s not much worth relating, except that guff about it’s the humidity, not the temperature is true. Thirty below on the Archangel Railroad is more miserable than thirty below at the Jackson Hole Ski Area. Mostly, our job was to cover British retreats and wave good-bye to white Russian deserters.

  Years later, when Bill was a person of note in the Mountain West, he used to tell anyone would listen that him, me, and Shad walked from Finland to Moscow and back. I even read the story in a newspaper or two and heard it told at Armistice Day banquets. There was no truth to the claim, but when I gave people the real story, no one wanted to hear. Folks like to believe the far-fetched and bizarre. That’s why I don’t exaggerate in this oral history.

  Lydia said, “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  Oly said, “You’re here to record, not give up opinions.”

  Lydia said, “Let’s skip Russia and jump to 1980.”

  Oly said, “Slim chance.”

  Spring of 1920 found us in Le Havre, France, where Bill and Shad boarded a ship bound for New York. I stood on the pier and watched them go. The United States of America held no allure for me. At Agatha’s demand, I’d sworn to God never to return to Montana or Wyoming. California seemed interesting, but I remembered how sick I’d been crossing the Atlantic the first time. I would need one heck of a good reason to cross again, and at that point, I had no good reason to rise from bed in the morning, much less cross the Atlantic.

  I do admit, though, it felt eerie seeing those two pass from my life. One of the few pieces of wisdom my father gave me before he dropped into the opium fog was this: if you’
re raised on crap, you’ll take a hankering to it. I’d been raised on Shad and Bill, and while I hadn’t exactly taken a hankering to them, I had grown accustomed to their habits. Shad especially gave me solid ground on which to stand in bad times. Him and the Army kept me from going completely to hell.

  ***

  Once they pulled out and I was no longer in the Army, I’m ashamed to say I did just that—went completely to hell. I no doubt would have followed Dad into the fog, had opium been readily available. Instead I turned drunk. I drifted into what was the capital of the drinking world at that time—Paris.

  There is no way to overstate the river of alcohol that flowed through Paris in the early 1920s. Every poet, painter, and debauched man and woman gravitated to Paris, where they were met by open arms and an aperitif.

  I myself used my mustering-out check from the Canadian Army to pay twelve francs rent on an unheated carriage garage full of nineteenth-century furniture, wall hangings, and knickknacks in the garden of a run-down house in Montparnasse owned by two elderly sisters whose husbands and sons had perished in the conflict. The old girls were closet drunks themselves. After that first month, I earned my keep by running grocery, cheese, and wine errands for the sisters, who never left that house for weeks at a time. The both of them sat in the dark front parlor, rocking their chairs and sipping Vin de Fruits rouge I bought them by what in America was called a half gallon. I don’t know what they called it, other than big bottle.

  ***

  I wasn’t one to drink myself stupid all alone in a dark garage full of spiders and mice, not when the biggest free-for-all of the twentieth century was busting loose a hundred yards down the butte. That particular century—this particular century—is known for decadence, especially toward the ’60s and ’70s, when the pill and penicillin made sex harmless and the children rediscovered dope, but no times come close to the unfettered wildness of Paris in the summer of 1921. Unless maybe it’s Paris in the summers of ’22 and ’23.

  My booze of choice was a liqueur called marc, something of a cross between beer and wine with the kick of whiskey—loads of sugar, more loads of alcohol content. Since mostly I didn’t have money of my own and most of my drinks were cadged, I drank whatever was offered, whenever and with whoever offered it, but the few times I bought for myself, marc always came first.

  Marc was introduced to me by a Polish poet named Josef. Josef said he was a poet, anyway. Thousands of people back then said they were poets. Josef sniffed ether and spoke English, after a fashion. He’d fought in Russia, although I never pinned him down as to which side he was on. He maintained the Western Front was a walk in the woods compared to Russia.

  “Ask any German soldier which front they preferred for comfort and a chance at survival, they shall say France. The Western Front was for pampered namby boys.”

  I would have hit him, but he was my only friend, if you want to call it that, and by then, I was hitting everyone else. I got in so many fistfights that summer, I was actually 86ed from some bars, which was practically impossible in that age of drunkenness. More than the once, I’ve laid down on the public sidewalk and slept next to writers and painters who are known to this day.

  Most of 1921, and a good part of 1922, is only a smoky blur in my memory. Two nights stick out—three. The third changed my life in a heartbeat. The first was a riot between Dadaists and surrealists in the Théâtre Antoine. I don’t know what sparked it off, but hundreds of men and some women were so infuriated when creative types didn’t agree with their system of thought that they fought all through the theater, into the lobby, and out on the street. I was in hog heaven. First I jumped in with the Dadaists, then, when the surrealists needed help, I switched. For the most part, the cubists stood on the curb and picked their noses. My dream would be to see gangs of poets, writers, painters, actors, and sculptors battling each other over artistic theory in America. We would be the better for it.

  The second night to remember came in the Caméléon. The Caméléon was a cross between a nightclub and a university. Drunken brawls were interspersed by lectures. This rainy night in early July—July 4, which meant something in Montana, but not Paris—they showed paintings at the Caméléon, and for some reason, maybe out of patriotism, I acted like an American. That is to say, I loudly denounced art that I didn’t understand. The paintings were bright colors broke into shards like shattered glass glued back together all wrong.

  That’s what I told Josef. “A monkey could do this,” I said loud enough for all to hear.

  Josef tried to shush me, but I was on a roll.

  “I’ll wager you whatever money I’ve got on me”—none, by the way—“a monkey did this by throwing a tantrum, and they’ve posted it as a joke to fool the idiot critics.”

  A little Spaniard in a black suit, funny hat, and a cocaine rock visibly perched along the inner rim of his nostril took offense. I know he was Spanish, because he spewed the language at me for a minute before he said in perfect English, “Are you calling me a monkey?”

  “Are you calling yourself an artist?”

  He spit out a Spanish insult. With insults like that, you don’t have to know the language to know what you’ve been called.

  I admit, I threw the first punch. He turned just as I struck, so all he got was a glancing blow to the shoulder—nothing you would think worthy of the upshot, which was his friends and hangers-on pummeling me. A huge, smelly man in coveralls got my left arm, while a dandy in a top hat and spats got my right, and a screaming delirious woman with a harelip and a walking stick beat me. I recall that harelip. And she was mean as a copperhead. She called me all kinds of nasty names, most of which I didn’t understand.

  When men wade into a person, their intent is to incapacitate their opponent, knock him out, stomp him in the scrotum—whatever it takes to make the victim stop fighting. Women, on the other hand, fight to spoil your looks. They scratch your face. Bloody your nose. Box your ears. To a woman, being ugly is worse than being unconscious, so their goal is to make their opponents ugly.

  That woman did as much damage as she could to my face before she wore out, then three or four of the men lifted me off the floor, carried me to the door, and hurled me over the sidewalk and into the street. Just before I was heaved through the door, I got a look at the Spaniard. His arm was snaked around the harelip like she was his darling. She was lighting his cheroot. His eyes met mine, and he smirked, as if to say, Look at what I am, and look at what you are. See the difference and suffer.

  My psychological take, now that I’m firmly implanted in senior citizenship, is this: I craved punishment. Because I had betrayed Agatha and rutted on Swamp Fox, I thought I deserved the stuffing beat out of me every day and every night. I didn’t think in those terms then, but I certainly behaved as if that was my intent.

  Josef came outside in the rain to pull me back to the sidewalk so I wouldn’t get run over. I was all for charging back in to wipe the smirk off the Spaniard’s weasel face, but Josef pinned my arms to my sides and wouldn’t let go.

  “Fool, that was Picasso you attacked,” he said.

  I’d heard the name. You’d have to be a deaf-mute to live in Paris and not have heard of Picasso. “I don’t care if he’s Napoleon, only a coward lets other folks fight his fights.”

  “Picasso is the wealthiest artist in the world. His minions do battle for him.”

  I stopped the struggle. “Wealthy artist?” I’d met a large number of artists in the bars and cafes of Paris, but never one who was rich. Mostly, artists at that time starved. I didn’t think there was such a thing as wealthy artist.

  “The work you said was painted by monkeys will sell for a hundred thousand francs.”

  He took his hands off me. I tucked my shirttail in one side of my pants but forgot the other, on account of I was drunk. “That painting was simple. I could draw that with crayons and scissors.”

  He leaned o
ut to pick up my hat, which was brim down in an oily puddle. “Many say they can, but only Picasso does.”

  I walked to the window and looked in at the crowd of people drinking, dancing, and carrying on as if there’d never been a war. The room was full of smoke and laughter. A group stood semi-circle around the Spanish whelp, entranced by his pontification. The woman had a hand on his chest. On the wall, the paintings hung like smashed stained-glass windows.

  I said, “You say people pay for that?”

  “Everyone wants a Picasso.”

  ***

  I spent the last of my mustering money, that had been hid in saddlebags beneath my soiled clothes, on paint and brushes, and I became a Bohemian artist. Canvas was expensive, so I cut up black velvet draperies that were lying around my carriage-house storeroom. I found the colors stood out better on velvet than they did on canvas. I’m surprised da Vinci and Rembrandt and all those old guys didn’t think to work on velvet.

  It didn’t take but one walk along the banks of the river to see dozens were copying Picasso, Modigliani, and the few who actually made a living. They’d paint at home, all but the last two strokes, then set up their easels across from Notre Dame and wait for the tourists who were starting to discover Paris again after all those years when travel was ill-advised. As the tourists passed by, the artists would apply the finishing touches and offer to sell the painting, cheap.

  The problem was there were too many artists, and by hanging around eavesdropping on would-be buyers who spoke English, it was evident that bunch didn’t cotton to Cubism, Dadaism, surrealism, or any other postwar modern-ism. American tourists wanted something that looked like itself, only French.

  By the hundreds, they said, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.”

  Then, on a blistering-hot afternoon, while contemplating where my next drink was coming from, in the Tuileries Gardens, I found a Western Story Magazine on a park bench. Lord knows who left it there. The stories themselves were god-awful cowboy myth junk—black hat, white hat, yep, nope, smile when you call me that, pardner—but the picture on the front cover was a Charlie Russell painting. I always did enjoy Charlie Russell, even back in Billings, and I got to wondering how he would fare up against the Parisians, or how they would fare at his subject matter, and inspiration slapped me upside the head. Okay, I had an absinthe hangover, but that doesn’t make the inspiration any less real.