Social Blunders (18 page)

I looked over at Maurey, who was making cowboy cappuccino. She would enjoy this story. “What’d you and Eugene do?”

“I ran around and locked the other doors and windows. Eugene took notes. He wants to write his thesis on my family.”

We chitchatted a few minutes, or Shannon chitchatted while I counted the number of holes in Maurey’s phone mouthpiece—eighteen.

Shannon said, “Gilia and her parents aren’t speaking to each other, so she spends the night here sometimes. We have a lot in common.”

There was a long silence while I searched for a detail to study.

“Gilia Saunders,” she said.

I guess she wanted a comment. I couldn’t even breathe, much less comment.

“She and I are going to New York City over Spring Break. She wants to take me shopping and to art galleries and all that stuff you never would do with me.”

I stared at the turkey remains on the table. Hank had gone to town to be with Lydia, and Pete only ate some dressing and gravy before lying down, but the six of us who remained had pretty much left the carcass in tatters.

I said, “That’s nice of Gilia.”

“We drove down to see Clark Gaines. He’s back home now. He said to say ‘hello.’”

“I have to hang up now.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Thank you.”

***

Dear Babs and Lynette,

Enclosed you will find two envelopes addressed to Gilia Saunders of 16 Corner Creek Drive in Greensboro. Would each of you mind dropping her a note explaining my relationship to Sam and Sammi and why my name is on the birth certificates instead of the real fathers?

This favor will save me from much groveling.

Yours,

Sam Callahan

***

Dear Gilia,

I’m surprised to hear that you don’t know which is worse—what I did with Katrina Prescott or running away afterward. I ran because I had hurt you, I had confirmed all your worst opinions of men, and I didn’t think you wanted to hear my excuses. Not that there are any. I told myself someday I would make a commitment to you and after that I would be true from now on, but in the meantime, it didn’t matter what I did. That, of course, is a lie. Wanting to love someone means loving them now. Or not at all.

I went cross-country skiing today. The snow was beautiful and cold. As I skied, I thought about why I was a dipshit to you, and here, near as I can see, is it:

Before we met I had two wives and an uncountable number of relationships, ranging from twenty minutes to four months, and every woman had this in common—she was desperate. I thought a woman had to be a drunk, crazy, extraordinarily young, unhappily married, or in big trouble before she would want me. She had to need what I have to give—sex and money. I thought no one desirable could love me. I married women I knew it wouldn’t hurt to lose.

Then I met you, and you are desirable. You don’t need me. We simply have fun being together and that scared me so much I had trouble breathing. When you have something that matters, you have something to lose.

Katrina couldn’t touch me, so I slept with her. You could touch me, so I drove you away. And I regret it. And I am sorry.

Sam

Pete relapsed in early December. One evening he was tireder than usual and the next morning he didn’t get out of bed. Maurey, Chet, and a doctor floated in and out of Maurey and Pud’s old bedroom with exaggerated quietness and muffled tones. No one said it aloud, but the general feeling was this time was for keeps.

It was Tuesday, six days before Christmas. Maurey’s son, Auburn, and Roger, who can’t or won’t speak, sat perched on a board, solemnly watching me flake hay off bales. Behind the boys, I could see Hank Elkrunner’s ponytail and part of his right wrist, which snapped up and down as he turned the team toward the Gros Ventre River Road.

“Too fast,” Auburn shouted. “Gristle will hog it all.”

Gristle had two white feet and massive dingleberries hanging off her butt, and she’d appointed herself herd bully. Whenever I came near the equine bitch she would pull her lips off her teeth and lean toward my face. Hank said she smelled my fear, but I think she just enjoyed biting people.

“Let’s shoot her for bear bait,” I said. Auburn’s face turned scared. He can’t tell when I’m kidding yet, so he tends to take me literally, which sure as hell isn’t how I care to be taken.

“Maybe I could read the others
Winning Through Intimidation
,” I said. I looked at Roger and winked, but his expression didn’t change. The boy’s expression never changed. Always the impassive observer. We weren’t sure how old Roger was, but he looked younger than Auburn, who was soon to turn twelve. Roger had the eyes of a person considerably older and more world-weary than any of us, and that’s saying a lot.

I slid the X-Acto knife under the bale twine and cut up, toward my face. The loose string went into a potato sack at my feet, then, as forty or so horses led by the selfish nag Gristle shuffled in our path, I shoved layers of lime-green-and-yellow grass onto the tracked-over snow. Way off to the south, the sun shone weakly through a smattering of high clouds. Up by the ranch buildings, aspens stood against the hill like gangly white skeletons with oozing joints, while in creases along the foothills spruce and lodgepole pine made a kelly green mosaic on the snow, and way off alone an occasional limber pine declared its independence from everyone—animal or plant.

The propriety of the whole scene kind of got to me, like I was an important piece of a huge jigsaw puzzle or a character in an Amish movie. Working outdoors in weather will do that sometimes—give you the feeling of being minutely small yet still consequential.

I looked at the fenceline and saw 1966. Wyoming women. Broad shoulders, flat bellies, unafraid to look men in the eye. My Dodgers won the pennant, lost the World Series. That summer I’d gotten downwind of a grass fire in Curtis Canyon and the smoke stayed in my nose for weeks, so wherever I went I swore the immediate vicinity was smoldering. I slept with a shovel under the bed. I asked a girl named Tracy Goodman on a date and she said “Okay,” but when I went to pick her up she’d gone shopping in Idaho Falls. I often dreamed of winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and when I stood at the podium to give my speech I would start out, “
Eat shit, Tracy Goodman
.”

Auburn’s voice cut through my vision. “Earth to Sam. Earth to Sam.”

Maurey taught him to say that and he thinks it’s hilarious. He turned to rap Hank on the shoulder. “Sam’s left his body again.”

Hank glanced back at me. “Tell Sam to close his mouth so his spirit can’t escape while he’s gone.”

“Close your mouth so your spirit can’t escape—”

“I heard him, Auburn.”

Maurey doesn’t mind, but Lydia throws a fit when Hank talks about turning into a bird and flying around the universe in front of Auburn. She’s afraid Auburn will take him seriously, which Hank says is the point.

“I was daydreaming,” I said.

Hank gave his Blackfeet chuckle. “Bad practice to daydream with a knife in your hand. It may bite you.”

Auburn laughed and I pretended to. What I actually did was block thoughts of Lydia by studying a lone raven flying toward the red hills across the river.

Hank said, “Pud’s coming.”

Pud’s white van with the
Talbot Satellite Dish Systems Repair
magnetic sign on the passenger door picked its way through the ruts and slush. We’re always the last county road plowed, so the ice base forms thickest, and when a rare December warm spell comes along it’s like driving through Dairy Queen soft ice cream. Takes four-wheel drive and the faith to keep moving no matter what. Those who stop may not start again.

Hank angled the team—Luci and Desi—toward a semi-solid meeting place along the fence, where Pud wrestled the wheel until the van came to rest against the far snowbank. He opened the door and sat with his legs out of the van, waiting for us to skid up to the fence, then he hefted himself to the ground and crossed over the ruts.

Pud Talbot wears cowboy boots year-round and a yellow cap that reads
Dash Roustabout Service
. He’s no taller than me and has the famous chin that marks all the Talbots except Auburn. Pud’s brother Dothan is Auburn’s father, and I’m afraid I’ve allowed the deep animosity—read that as hatred—that runs between Dothan and me to color my feelings for Pud. Also Pud sleeps with Maurey, and whether Maurey and I have a brother-sister deal or first-lover nostalgia or we’re simply best friends for life, my chosen role is to quietly resent anyone who sticks himself into her body.

Luci and Desi shuffled to the fence and stopped, and us five males waited there a moment in the winter silence, which is so much more silent than summer silence there ought to be a different word for it.

Pud put one boot up on the snowbank and said, “Pete died.”

I looked away from Pud to the horses with their necks down, eating hay.

Hank said, “The doctors told us he had another month.”

“The doctors missed the call,” Pud said.

More silence. A white mare raised her head and stared directly at me. I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“How’re Maurey and Chet taking it?” Hank asked.

“About how you’d expect. They’ll be along in a couple hours.”

For some reason, I turned to look at Roger. His eyes were huge and terrified, like a panicked deer. His mouth opened and he screamed.

***

The secret to cornbread is in the oil. I would have used lard if I thought I could get away with it, but like everybody else in the drugs-and-alcohol generation, Maurey’s gone health crazy. As it was, I spooned a couple glops of Crisco into the ten-inch Dutch oven and stuck the Dutch oven in the real oven set at 350 degrees. Oil started, I pried the lid off the ceramic crock of sourdough starter that according to legend was brought across the Missouri River in 1881 by Maurey’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. I’d be willing to bet the crock hadn’t been washed since 1881. A thumb’s-width of dry dough skin ringed the lip of the crock like the rubber seal on a gasket.

I measured two dippers of starter into a 1950s Art Deco bowl and broke in four eggs, double what the recipe called for. Then I went to the refrigerator for buttermilk, where I mused for about the eightieth time that no one drinks straight buttermilk these days and it seems more than a change of style but a degradation of American values. Wasn’t that long ago you knew you could trust a man who drank buttermilk.

Toinette’s viola music filtered comfortably in from the next room. At the kitchen table, Roger and Auburn played a silent game of Risk. Roger’s scream hadn’t been one of those painful breakthroughs where the victim flashes onto what was repressed and starts talking again. From outward appearances, he didn’t seem affected by his foray into the world of sound. He knelt in the chair on his knees, leaning forward toward the game board, concentrating on pushing blue armies back and forth across the continents.

Auburn also adopted the quiet method of warfare. Roger’s coming to the ranch had been nothing but good for Auburn. He stopped whining at chores and his picky eating habits disappeared practically overnight. Childishness no longer washes when you’re paired off with a true survivor.

Maurey’s friend Mary Beth dropped Roger off at the TM a few days before my own arrival. Mary Beth said two men showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, and when they left the boy stayed, and she didn’t know what to do with him, so she brought him to Maurey. His father—who a long time ago was Mary Beth’s boyfriend—had been killed in Nicaragua running drugs or guns or something else horrible. Mary Beth mentioned slavery. She didn’t know how long Roger had been quiet. They thought he might be the half brother of Maurey’s artist friend who lives in Paris, but even that wasn’t certain. Maurey and Pud checked Roger over for scars and lice and no one had physically left marks on the boy, but one look in his soft brown eyes and it was clear he’d been through something that children shouldn’t go through.

I lowered the heat on the huge pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. Mealtimes the next few days were bound to be off kilter, so it seemed a good idea to have something continuously ready. Freud could go to town on why I chose chicken soup, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t care what my motives were. I pulled the Dutch oven from the oven and carefully poured oil into the starter mix. This was the point where twice before I burned the bejesus out of myself. The rest was basically unskilled labor—mix in the whole wheat flour, cornmeal, salt, baking powder, baking soda. I had a box of sugar hidden in the pot-holder drawer. Maurey called sugar white death, but she made an exception for my cornbread.

Roger’s face jerked toward the dark window and his eyes widened and a moment later headlights flashed on the log gate out by the road. I opened the oven door with the toes of my left foot and fondled in the cornbread. In the yard, the Suburban engine coughed, doors slammed, boots knocked snow off against the porch.

Then Maurey was in the kitchen, hugging me. I felt her face on my neck. I patted the thick hair on the back of her head and smelled her jojoba shampoo. She cried a few seconds, less than a minute, as I looked across at Chet, standing inside the door with his hands at his side. Toinette’s music stopped and she appeared at the other door, bow in hand.

Maurey pulled away and looked at my face. We’re almost the same height.

She said, “Life is the shits.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. Thanks for being here.” She moved off to hug Toinette.

I stepped toward Chet, then stopped, raised a hand, lowered it. I smiled a weak I-mean-well smile, and he smiled back “I know. It’s okay.”

There was more boot kicking at the front door before Pud and Hank came in. They must have been in the bunkhouse, waiting. Hank certainly wasn’t shy about touching Chet. They bear-hugged like athletes. Pud held Maurey. Toinette looked sad and pregnant. Auburn carefully kept his eyes off the adults, but Roger was a camera. I got the definite feeling he could see right through emotions, that he knew every coloration of every relationship in the room—whose love was pure and whose tainted by self-interest—and I failed the test.

Chet hung his coat on the deer antler rack by the door. “I need to use the phone,” he said. “There’s friends in New York…”

Maurey broke from a muffled conversation with Pud. She said, “Use the one in our room,” meaning Hank’s old room, where she and Pud moved when Pete needed a bed. Maurey looked at me and said, “Come help me pick out Pete’s clothes.”

“I was fixing to make dumplings.”

“Dumplings can wait.”

***

I gave Toinette instructions on when to pull out the corn-bread, then I followed my friend into her dead brother’s room. I found her sitting on the dead brother’s bed, staring glumly into the dead brother’s open closet doors.

“Did you know it’s illegal to cremate a body naked?” she said.

“That’s not something I’ve thought about too often.”

“You have to buy a coffin, too.”

“I guess the funeral homes were afraid they’d lose money when burial went out of style.”

“Why didn’t you disagree with me when I said life is the shits?”

I almost had disagreed, but we were making such nice eye contact I couldn’t spoil it. “Didn’t seem like the time to argue,” I said.

Maurey pooched her lower lip the way Shannon does when she doesn’t get her way. “Life isn’t the shits,” she said. “Life is fun; it’s all this death that’s the shits.”

I sat on the bed beside her. “It’s not death either. It’s loving people who die.”

She doubled up her fists. “Death is boring. Boring, boring, boring. I hate death. It ruins everything.” She looked at me fiercely. “You better not die on me.”

“I won’t if I can help it.”

“Just don’t.” She started to cry again.

I took her hands and unclenched the fists, then held them. We sat silently, remembering other deaths.

“The doctors said he had another month,” I said.

“Doctors say whatever they think you want to hear. That’s why so many of them drink—they can’t stand themselves.”

“Roger screamed when he heard about Pete.”

Maurey looked at me. “Aloud?”

“You wouldn’t believe how loud. I was hoping he would talk after that, but he clammed right back up. I don’t think he even remembers screaming.”

Maurey extracted her hands from mine and looked down at her palms. She has extremely small hands. Twenty years of working outdoors had left them tough. “He’s been stealing food.”

“Roger?”

“He hides rolls and cheese in his box springs. I found half a chicken in the laundry bag.”

Maurey blinked quickly and her voice caught on a sob sound. “I can’t do anything for him, Sam. I say, ‘Bring me your dried-up drunks, your abused babies, all those lost souls,’ but I can’t do a damn thing for any of them. I let my own brother die.”

I waited a while and said, “You helped me.”

“You don’t need help. You need someone to convince you you’re not a jerk.”

So that was it. “You’re not a savior.”

“That makes us even.” She laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh of a person amused. “Now, if you were dead, what would you want to be cremated in?”

I thought. “My Los Angeles Dodgers boxer shorts.”

“You would, wouldn’t you? Pete doesn’t even own boxer shorts. Didn’t.”

We chose a light blue Van Heusen shirt with short sleeves and a three-tone sweater Pete and Maurey’s mom knitted while she was in rehab. One look at the sweater and you knew the creator was schizophrenic.