Lydia (10 page)

“Too hot.”

“Too dry.”

“Dirty.”

“Hicksville.”

They are okay taken one at a time, but pregnant girls were never meant to bunch up. Roger escaped by offering to run a dish of ice cream down to Angel. She answered her door wearing a maraschino cherry red fleece bathrobe, and when Roger offered the ice cream she said she couldn’t eat a bite. She took the dish from him anyway and invited him inside, where she proceeded to wolf the ice cream so quickly Roger got a headache just watching her. Angel had eggshell white skin and black eyes. Her hair was cut shorter than Roger’s, which as a general rule, he didn’t care for, but on Angel it worked.

She said, “Don’t tell anyone you saw me eat this.”

“Okay.”

“I have a reputation.”

When Angel handed the dish back to Roger, she touched his wrist and said, “If I came to your cabin, would you send me away?”

“No.”

“Would you ever come to me first?”

“I brought you ice cream.”

“You know what I mean. Would you come to my cabin if I didn’t come to yours?”

“No.”

“That’s fair. I like it when I understand the rules.”

***

Back in his cabin, Roger poured himself a juice glass of brandy and put Chet Baker’s
Young Chet
on the CD player. He pulled his boots off on the bootjack and dug under the bed behind his photo album for a pair of woolly slippers Gilia had given him for Christmas. They were red with monkey-head toes. He kept them hidden whenever he had company, but they were the ideal slippers for an evening of brandy, jazz, and a book.

The book was the part of the equation he had been avoiding.
Disappearance
sat on the end table stump, next to his rocking chair, which was in front of the unlit woodstove. Roger propped his slippered feet on the oven door and rocked and sipped brandy. He wasn’t ready to touch the book quite yet. First, he had to formulate hopes. It seemed important to know what he was looking for before going off in search of it. The book had to be about terrible things—child abuse and kidnapping and violent behavior—or else no one would have published it. They don’t print novels about happy people.

Roger finished off his brandy and set the glass on the stump. He picked up the book and gently turned it in his hands. There was fear the book would change his life, and equal fear it wouldn’t. The temptation was to read the ending first, but he knew the boy disappeared and wasn’t found or Lydia would not have seen him in the story.

Eden Rae O’Connor opened the door and came in. She was wearing a long, oversize T-shirt with a panda bear on the front and, from what Roger could see, nothing else. She was crying. Tears tracked makeup down her cheeks and quivered on the end of her chin. The top of her shirt was wet from tears. Her hands cupped her huge belly, as if to keep that one part of her together while the rest fell apart.

“Did you scrog with Angel Byron?” she asked.

“I took her ice cream.”

“You better be nice to me. I’m more pregnant than she is. You can go at it like rabbits after I’m gone, but right now I can’t share.”

Roger set
Disappearance
back on the stump. “Come in and let me rub your shoulders. I’ll make you feel better.”

Eden walked into the cabin. She said, “I’m under a lot of stress.”

***

“I came to an important realization last night,” I said. “Guess what it is?”

My mother looked up from the sugar swirling in her iced tea. One of her favorite pastimes was to dump two heaping spoonfuls of sugar into a glass of iced tea, then stir like hell and watch as the crystals went from real to imagined.

She said, “You realized that questions like ‘Guess what I’m thinking?’ make your friends and loved ones gag.”

“I realized that no matter how long I live, I shall never sleep with Linda Ronstadt.”

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, “Ter
rif
ic! 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 across 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.