by Tim Sandlin
22
The Refried Boogie Bar was typical central California coast style—squishy asphalt, heavy neon, cinderblock, more pickups than cars out front. Greasy burgers and onion rings to the right, bar and tables to the left, dance floor the size of an elevator, soundless TV set to a Giants game. Juke box playing CDs. The bartender was an aging hippie who told Lydia his name was Red, he had a pot farm out in the national forest, and two kids in Head Start.
He said, “You want another of those?”
Lydia said, “How’s your life turning out, Red? Things going about the way you expected?”
He eyed her a moment, flicked a bar rag toward her empty Jack Black on-the-rocks glass, and said, “You need anything, let me know.”
“I’ll do that.” Lydia spun the bar stool to face out toward the tables and surveyed the room like reading a fast-food menu. It was mostly men, mostly not out hoping to hook up with a woman. This wasn’t a singles bar. Two girls in cowboy hats and designer jeans line-danced to whatever country song was on the jukebox. Lydia didn’t recognize the song or the female singer lamenting love for a man whose wife treated him poorly but he was too honorable to forsake her. Lydia was way beyond that. Country music couldn’t touch her these days.
She zeroed in on a table of five working men, drinking beer and idly watching the line dancers. Four had on baseball caps that said things like Cat and Dash. The cockiest-looking one of the bunch wore his cap backward, but the others wore them straight. The kid without a cap had clunky glasses, a San Jose Sharks windbreaker, and curly hair and looked too young to be in the bar. He was nursing something either stronger or weaker than beer. Lydia couldn’t tell which, only that it came in a glass instead of a bottle.
The cocky one saw Lydia watching them. He pointed a bottle lip in her general direction and said something that made the others chuckle. Nothing overtly aggressive. The scene was low-key as ladies sewing a crazy quilt.
When Lydia reached the table, she discovered they were discussing the benefits of an I-beam suspension. The guy with his hat on backward held strong opinions. He hated Ford trucks with a passion normally reserved for interpersonal relationships.
“Ford ain’t been worth flying horse manure since 1982,” and the others nodded knowingly, all except the young one in glasses, who looked at Lydia.
“You fellas up for a test?” Lydia asked.
“Urine or blood?” the oldest one said, and none of the others smiled. Lydia realized he wasn’t being cute.
“History,” Lydia said.
The old guy looked nervous. The cocky one with the backward hat said, “What do we get if we pass?”
“A surprise,” Lydia said. “Now, can any of you tell me who Valerie Solanas was?”
The four in caps looked at each other with beats-me eyes. The young one took a sip of whatever he was drinking and said, “She’s the woman shot Andy Warhol.”
“Who’s Andy Warhol?” asked the old guy.
“Artist,” the kid said.
The cocky bastard leaned his chair back on two legs. “How the hell do you know who this woman was who shot him?”
The kid pushed his glasses up on his nose. They were the boxy, thick-framed type made popular by Elvis Costello. “My grandma was a bra burner.”
The others laughed. Lydia thought, Grandma?
“My sister and I stayed summers with her in Monterey. She knew the whole history of bra burning. Used to talk about the crazy things the women would do to get at men.”
“Did she ever tell you about Lydia Callahan?” Lydia asked.
He scratched his wrist and thought. “No. I don’t think so.”
“That is immaterial,” Lydia said. “You know the answer, so you win the prize.”
“What prize is that?” Backward Cap asked.
Lydia tapped the kid on the head. “Come with me.”
He said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Call me ma’am once more, and the deal is off.”
***
Shannon and Roger lay on his queen bed, on top of the spread, fully clothed except for their shoes. Shannon had insisted Roger take off his shoes. He wouldn’t have had the nerve on his own. They’d doubled the pillows, and he lay on his back with Shannon’s head on the stretch of chest below his shoulder. His arm was around her, and her hands were curled together on his sternum. They were both more comfortable than they could remember being before, with members of the other gender. Roger was almost asleep.
“Tell me about the first time we were alone together,” Shannon said. “Did you know I was the one then, or did it come to you later?”
“Some then, but mostly later,” Roger said. “I was too young to think of anybody as the one. I just remember I wanted to see you naked.”
Shannon smiled and poked a finger into Roger’s ribs. “I bet you thought that about every girl you met.”
“Maybe.” Roger tried to recall the girls he’d met in his early years in Wyoming. “We didn’t have a lot of girls at the TM Ranch, and the ones we did have were recovering alcoholics or drug addicts or something. Maurey was always taking in lost souls. That’s why I was there.”
“You were a lost soul?”
“I was a little kid who couldn’t take care of himself, and no one else wanted to, besides Maurey. I wasn’t speaking out loud back then. People treated me like I was retarded, or whatever the word is now. Maurey’s the only one acted like I was a person.”
“What about me?”
Roger stared at the ceiling. “By that second time you came—a couple of Christmases after Uncle Pete died—I’d started talking. We had a conversation.”
Shannon snuggled deeper into Roger. It felt natural as the sun coming up. “What’d I say?”
Roger dropped his head so his chin momentarily rested on the top of her head. He ran his fingers up her back, then back down. “Christmas Eve, I went out to the barn to check on Rip. He had a lung infection, and we’d put him up in a stall for doctoring.”
“Rip’s a horse?”
“Don’t you remember Rip Torn?”
“Sorry.”
“I found you in the tack room, sitting on a saddle, smoking a joint.”
Shannon flattened her right hand on Roger’s belly. “Oh my.”
“You seemed lonely.”
“I don’t smoke joints anymore, Roger. You should know that about me. I’m more interested in caffeine than marijuana.”
“You said, ‘Don’t tell Mom. She’ll freak out and pull an intervention on me,’ and I said, ‘I won’t tell.’”
“Did I offer you a toke?”
“No. I sat on a bale, and you told me the right way to make divinity. You said in Carolina, every house you went to had divinity at Christmastime, and all anyone had in Wyoming was candy corn, and you hated Wyoming.”
“I was so self-obsessed back then. I must have been a total pain to be around. It’s the family curse. My greatest fear is I might grow up like Lydia.”
“Lydia’s not so bad.”
Shannon raised her face off Roger’s shirt and looked at him. “She dragged you all the way out here on false hopes, just to catch a ride so she could talk to Hank in prison.”
“What makes you think my hopes are false?”
Shannon lowered her head to his chest again. This was comfortable. She felt like she could say anything true, and Roger wouldn’t turn mean on her. “No one let me in on the trip details, but from what I’ve picked up, she wants you to believe you’re a little boy in a novel.”
Roger hadn’t faced it quite so bluntly before. He’d said as much to Lydia, but not with any conviction. The idea that he was a character in a made-up story was ridiculous. He began to wonder what had possessed him to come on this trip. Was he so desperate for a past, he’d been willing to take off across America with no more evidence than what Lydia had dug
up in an old book? That was pathetic.
Shannon sensed she’d made him unhappy. She reached across his body and squeezed him. “I’m sorry, Roger. I don’t want to be a spoilsport. It’s just, what are the odds?”
His thought process went on to the next conclusion. “If I hadn’t let Lydia bring me to California, we wouldn’t by lying here. We might not have become a couple.”
“That still doesn’t make me want to end up like Lydia.”
The door opened without anyone knocking, and Oly rolled in, still wearing boxers and nothing else. He had the now-empty rum bottle between his flappy legs. Lydia was pushing the chair.
She said, “Look who got lost.”
Shannon said, “He wasn’t lost.”
“Your turn to baby-sit.” Then Lydia was gone. She didn’t even shut the door.
Roger slid out from under Shannon. He stood and moved over behind Oly. “You ready for bed, Pard?”
Oly was worked up. His eyes popped in a cross between drunk and stimulated. He said, “She brought home a boy.”
Shannon sat up and stared at him.
Oly’s mouth was a drooly crack. “Lydia went out and got herself a boy to play with.”
***
His name was Warren. He was standing right where Lydia had left him, in front of the air conditioner. He would have been staring out the window at the parking lot, had the curtains been open. As it was, Warren appeared lost in curly-haired introspection.
Lydia said, “How old are you, Warren?” She’d kicked off her shoes and was sitting on the bed with her legs crossed, almost, but not quite, seductively.
Warren turned away from the curtains. “Twenty-three.”
Lydia arched an eyebrow at him.
He said, “Twenty.”
Standing in the motel room, away from the bar and peer pressure, Warren looked to have more confidence than he had earlier. In the car, he had asked no questions about where they were going. At the Comfort Inn, he asked no questions about why they were there or where she was taking the ancient gnome in the wheelchair. He seemed to know instinctively what was expected of him.
To Lydia, no one able to tell you the story of Valerie Solanas could be a total idiot. That’s why she had given the men the test. She wasn’t simply searching for an anonymous dick—not at her age.
“How do you spend your days, Warren?”
“I hang Sheetrock for my uncle Mark.” Warren made no move to come toward her or to sit down. He hadn’t even taken off the Sharks windbreaker. “He was at the table there. The whole crew was at the table. I’m kind of nervous about what they’re going to say Tuesday, when we go back to the job site.”
Lydia patted the bed next to her—an invitation. “You’ll be a hero, Warren. Trust me on this. They’ll make jokes and tease you about robbing the grave, but each and every one of those good old boys will wish he’d been chosen.”
Warren moved over and sat where Lydia had shown him. He kept his hands on his thighs, palms down. “I wonder if Uncle Mark will tell Mom.”
“Not likely. Men tend to cover for each other.”
“You know a lot about men, for being a woman.”
“Studying men is a hobby of mine. Always has been, since I was a child. I take it quite seriously.” She reached over and brushed a curl of hair off his forehead. He reminded her of a boy she’d known in high school, a boy she knew was secretly smitten by her. For two years, the kid tried to work up the nerve to ask her out, and she would have gladly gone, but he never did ask, and for some reason she couldn’t explain to herself, Lydia didn’t take the step necessary to help him. It was as if she wanted to know him better, but if he was too much of a coward to make his move, she was willing to pass. Now, she regretted her lack of initiative. Lydia firmly believed it’s the ones you could have had and skipped that haunt you more than the ones you had, no matter how good or bad they turned out to be.
Lydia said, “You know the drill here?”
He stared down at the carpet between his feet. “We’re supposed to do the dirty, right?”
“That is correct.” She took his glasses and placed them on the bed, on the side away from Warren. “Have you ever had sex before, Warren?”
He blinked in his new near blindness. “Of course.”
Lydia waited.
He said, “Do blow jobs count?
“Yes,” Lydia said. “Blow jobs count, Warren, no matter how much men pretend they don’t, blowjobs do count.”
He nodded. “Well then, I guess I have. Had sex before.”
She reached across to help him out of his windbreaker. He held up one arm, then the other, not exactly cooperating, but not resisting either.
Lydia said, “Let’s take this slow and easy, okay, Warren? I’m out of practice, and you’re new to the game. We want the experience to be something you’ll remember fondly when you’re my age.”
Warren finally turned toward Lydia. He looked into her eyes and said, “What should I do first?”
***
Shannon and Roger had moved under the sheets, facing each other, wearing nothing but boxers on him and panties on her. In the next bed, Oly made the sounds of an old man sleeping, although they couldn’t be certain that’s what he was. Oly’s breathing always sounded like a bugling elk, even when he was awake, or to be precise, a bugling elk on the inhale and a train whistle on the exhale. Awake or asleep didn’t affect Oly much.
Shannon held her right palm flat against Roger’s chest. His hands lay inert at his sides. The arm on bottom was not only inert but also prickly dead.
“I need you to do me the biggest favor in the whole world,” Shannon said.
Roger tried to think of the biggest favor in the whole world. His ideas on the subject were much too complex. “Sure. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“I want you to smell me.”
“I can do that.”
“Down there.” Her eyelids blinked in the direction she had in mind. “Someone recently wounded me deeply by saying I smell badly. Down there. He compared me to rancid shrimp.”
“That’s cruel. He must have been in love with you.”
Once again, Shannon marveled at Roger’s intuition. How could a kid his age with practically no experience at relationships always come up with the right thing to say? It was like he was throwing out lines, only they were original and sincere coming from Roger where they wouldn’t have been coming from a man of the world. She said, “It’s awfully sweet of you to say so, but I think he only wanted to cause me pain. I’d rejected him, and he struck out with whatever he had.”
The prospect of going down there wasn’t nearly as intriguing as you would think for Roger. For one thing, he wasn’t certain what it’s supposed to smell like. He’d tried a couple of times, at the urging of his pregnant girls, and the logistics had been insurmountable.
“Hurting me was his way of regaining his pride,” Shannon said, “but now I’m totally paranoid. I saw people sniffing on the plane, and I was sure they were sniffing me. I worry about it all the time.”
“You shouldn’t let assholes control you.”
“I know that. What I don’t know is how he came up with the idea. Sometimes when people say things to be cruel, they’re telling the truth.”
“Okay.” Roger didn’t move. He was wondering what life would be like with this woman, if they were fated to be a couple, which evidently was what she had in mind. She seemed to have been raised to think abnormal behavior was normal. Roger had little experience distinguishing normal from abnormal. He was, after all, the boy whose entire sexual history consisted of pregnant teens. But he had some grasp of what regular women do and don’t do, and asking a man you’ve only gotten to know that day and never been with conjugally to smell your snatch didn’t seem regular.
Shannon blamed me for her way of accepting bizarre behavior as com
monplace, and I blamed Lydia. Lydia didn’t think about such things.
“Well,” Shannon said.
“Well, what?”
“Will you?”
Roger glanced over at Oly and started shrugging down into the sheets.
“It’s vitally important that you be honest,” Shannon said. “No matter how much you may think I don’t want to hear the truth, you have to give it to me. If I can’t trust you on this, I’ll never be able to trust you and I’ll go on being paranoid. I might turn into one of those high-strung women who can’t leave their house and communicates with folks through a mail slot.”
Roger’s voice came from deep under the covers. “I’ll tell the truth.”
Shannon lifted the sheet with her fingertips to give Roger air. “You’d better, or we might as well call it quits right here.”
Roger’s cheek brushed Shannon’s breast as he scrunched low in the bed. In the pitch-blackness, he felt heat rising off her stomach. She was soft as a rose petal down there, not like the over-inflated volleyball skin he’d felt on the eight-months-along girls. Most of them had not encouraged Roger to go down. They were too young or too pregnant to feel comfortable with the procedure, so Roger had little experience at slithering down a bed. The sheets were tucked tightly. He had to crumple his legs in an uncomfortable way. Shannon did nothing—such as sliding toward the headboard—to help.
She said, “Well?”
He said, “Just a minute.”
He found the hem of her panties and lifted it away from her skin.
“Don’t touch,” Shannon said. “We don’t want to start something we can’t stop. Just smell.”
Roger sniffed. He smelled talcum powder and maybe some fabric softener, but not much else. He said, “I’m coming up.”
After Roger hunched back up Shannon’s body and into the original position, she said, “Give it to me straight.”
“Lemon drops,” he said.
“Don’t mess with me.”
“And fresh snow on sagebrush.”
Shannon smiled. She couldn’t recall smelling fresh snow on sagebrush, but it sounded pleasant. Damp, maybe, but not too damp. More of a bracing chill. She liked sage. “What else?”
