Social Blunders (6 page)

“Babe Carnisek is a loser.”

“Your own wife called you a pinhead.”

“Don’t you dare slander my wife.”

I gave up on Skip and returned to Cameron. “This pinhead is your business partner?”

Cameron seemed vaguely amused. “I cannot allow you to frighten my family.”

“Look what you did to my family.”

Skip produced a checkbook and a Bic. “Let’s talk your language, pal.”

“I’m not your pal; I’m your son.”

“How much to change your story?”

“I hate to be disrespectful, but stick your money in your ear.” See how controlled I was, a lesser person would have said
ass
.

“I have associates who could hurt you real bad,” Skip said.

With each exchange, our voices grew louder. It had been a while since I’d dealt with a male long enough to argue. The feeling was like I’d separated from myself, as if I were watching TV and in the program at the same time.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “You do an awful thing to a little girl thirty-whatever years ago and now you have the scrotums to act like the injured parties.”

That shut everyone up for a while. I think Skip was figuring out what
scrotums
meant in this context. Cameron put both hands in the pockets of his windbreaker. He seemed to be figuring repercussions. What I noticed was how pretty the day was—silver-blue sky setting off the sienna red of post oaks lining the fairways. That’s my pattern during heightened emotional states—I focus on irrelevant details.

“Would you mind taking off your cap?” I asked Cameron.

He considered refusal, then gave a what-the-hell shrug and took off his
Duke
cap.

Just as I suspected. “You’re bald,” I said. “You’re left-handed and edging into fat.” I left out tall. “You probably aren’t the sperm father anyway.”

I couldn’t believe the coldness of his eyes. The man could out-Indian Hank Elkrunner. I tried staring him down but lost and had to cover my loss with talk. “But just because you aren’t the genetic culprit doesn’t mean you aren’t morally responsible for what you boys did to Lydia.”

Skip blew up. “What
we
did to Lydia. Your mother was a whore.”

Time for the dramatic gesture. Lydia didn’t teach me much, but she was the queen of the dramatic gesture. I moved up within six inches of Skip’s face. “To hell with your associates, Mr. Prescott”—if you say
Prescott
right, spit sprays on the P—“either hurt me now or shut your ugly beak.”

Skip’s blotches spread down his cheeks to his neck and he blinked like a strobe light. I expected him to belt me and us to roll around the driving range grass like grade school ruffians. But Katrina was right—he was a wimp. Thank God.

I snatched the club from his hands, spun around, and walked back to the golf cart. “Here’s how we test our steering wheels,” I said, and I showed him a trick my sales manager, Ambrosia, taught me. I stuck the club handle through the wheel and wedged it under the instrument panel. Then I bent Skip’s golf club into a U.

Skip’s eyes went wide at the sacrilege. Cameron smiled.

Time for the tough-guy exit. I threw the ruined club in Skip’s direction. “Next time it’s your spine, Pops.”

Pretty effective. I wish a woman had been there to watch.

Gilia Saunders was waiting at my car. She stood, blonde in the sunlight, holding a purse-like gym bag on her right arm, wearing a jean skirt and a short-sleeved shirt with no collar and an alligator over her left breast.

“Men piss me off,” I said. “Anything they can’t control is a threat.”

“You’ve been talking to Dad,” Gilia said.

“Do you think I’m dressed like a rag picker? What the hell is a rag picker?”

She studied me with that non-judgmental look on her face. She had the cheekbones and neck of an Indian. I was real aware that she was an inch or so taller than me, which put her around five eight, tall for a girl. She also had considerably better posture.

“You are dressed casually,” she said.

I had on a Wyoming Cowboys T-shirt and button-fly Wranglers. The T-shirt—jeans, too, for that matter—had seen better days. But I was raised to think men who care about what they wear are vain.

She did this shrug thing with her shoulders that made the alligator jump out at me. “I don’t mind. I like a man with the confidence to look like a slob at the country club.”

Mixed signals here. Was she implying she likes me or I’m a slob? Or both?

“How was your swim?” I asked.

“Two miles of backstroke. Then I came here for lunch, hoping I would run into you.”

Holy shit, I was having a non-typical day. “How did you know I was here?”

“Mom told me the men sent you a summons.”

“And you were hoping to run into me?”

She nodded, but didn’t explain why she was hoping to run into me. She leaned the bag on one hip and stood with her shoulders square to the Dodge. She seemed to expect me to talk, only I couldn’t know what to say until I knew why she was here.

To move the conversation along, I said, “Gilia’s a flower.”

“You got it.”

She put a hand on the chrome trim on top of the Dart. Her fingers were long and large boned, like her hips and knees. Four fingernails were shiny perfect—Mary Kay showpieces—but the index finger fingernail was torn short and ragged.

“Could we go somewhere and talk?” she asked. “Dad might see us here. He wouldn’t like it.”

“You want to talk to me?”

“Why not?”

***

We got in the car and I drove us to a city park. It was only a block-long grassy place astride a stagnant creek filtering down a weedy ditch. On the far end a couple of unattended children played on a wooden merry-go-round. I parked where we could watch the children but not be expected to run rescue on a skinned knee.

Gilia scooted away and leaned against the far door. “Do you ever feel like you’re the only one left speaking the language you speak?” she said. “Everybody in the world knows words you don’t know.”

I could tell this woman wasn’t into small talk. “Sometimes I can’t process waitresses or store clerks.”

She nodded eagerly. “Exactly. It’s like the syllables are jumbled and I’ve lost the decoder ring.”

“I don’t understand the relationship here. Am I supposed to treat you like a woman I would enjoy talking to, or a possible sister?”

“Don’t you talk to your sister?”

“I never had a sister, although my mom was more a sister than mother.”

“I have two brothers.”

“Actually, she was more a bad baby-sitter than a sister or mother.”

“One of my brothers is Southern macho and the other’s a brat.”

“I met the brat. He thought I was Jehovah’s Witness.”

“That’s Bob. Ryan is the Southern macho. He lifts weights and watches TV sports and says ‘Bitchin’ when Mom isn’t around. I don’t understand how I’m your possible sister. Katrina Prescott didn’t explain and Mom wouldn’t stop crying, but it seems like either my dad is your dad or he isn’t.”

“Is your mother Skip Prescott’s sister?”

“How’d you know?”

I ran a relationship chart in my head. “That means you might be my sister, but it’s just as likely you’re my cousin.”

“Out with it. What’s the deal here?”

I told her the story of Christmas Eve 1949—how Paw Paw Callahan promised he would come home but didn’t, so Lydia called her friend Mimi’s brother and the boys came over and Skip injected oranges with vodka from a syringe. When I came to the rape, Gilia got real still. Before that, her eyes had been moving, watching the children on the merry-go-round, keeping track of street traffic. At the word
rape
she looked directly at me. I had to meet her eyes or lose credibility.

“Dad pissed on her?”

“That’s what Lydia says.”

We were quiet a long time after that. She looked down at the floorboards. I could see her jaw, clenching and unclenching beneath the skin. Her hair was very blonde, right up to the scalp.

“I don’t know Dad well,” she said. “They shipped me off to boarding school in the eighth grade. Then I was accepted at Georgetown. The last four months is the first time I’ve lived with him since I was a little girl.”

“You went to prep school?”

“Boarding school.”

“You tied sweaters around your neck and wore shorts with baggy pockets for tennis balls? You played field hockey and compared boys of the Ivy League?”

Gilia almost smiled. “The cheap preppie label comes off after your first divorce.”

“You’re too young to be divorced.”

“There’s no such thing as too young to be divorced.”

She told me about the art history professor at Georgetown who could order off a French menu and recite Shakespearean sonnets, substituting his own feelings for the final couplet.

“I’d never dated a boy over twenty-one. Jeremy was so forceful when he said Salvador Dali was a no-talent bum.”

“You married the guy because he trashed Salvador Dali?”

Gilia’s face was amazingly expressive. Watching her was like reading a newspaper; everywhere I looked was a story.

“I guess so. And he was good in bed. I’d never slept with an experienced man before.”

I almost told her about Maurey training me to get the girls off every time, but I still wasn’t certain of our genetic relationship. It’d been so long since I’d met someone I had anything in common with, the tendency was to suspect shared parentage.

“Why did you get divorced?” I asked.

She gave the shrug I was already fond of. “He was a humanist who believed in situational fidelity. I talked myself into not seeing it until the night he got me in bed with him and a coed bimbo. After that I had to leave.”

“But you went through with it the once?”

She shrugged again.

“How did group sex make you feel?” I asked.

“Suicidal.”

“No sex is worth suicide.”

“To save myself, I stopped thinking and feeling and I slithered home to Mommy and Daddy. Now I shop, swim, and watch network television. Far as I see, that’s considered normal here. Everyone in my family stopped thinking and feeling years ago.”

A woman in a red Volkswagen bus pulled up at the other end of the park and hollered something at the children on the merry-go-round. They pretended not to hear her. The little boy fell off, picked himself up, and ran to the teeter-totter. He ran up one end of the teeter-totter and made it a couple steps onto the high side before his weight brought it down with a bang. The woman came out of the Volkswagen with her hands on her hips.

“So I went through the motions of behaving the way I was expected to behave,” Gilia said. “Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have nothing in common with anyone I know or will ever know.”

“That’s a good way to get depressed.”

“Tell me about it, Jack. Then one morning when I’m in the depths of numbness, a funny-looking man walks into the family room and announces my solid-to-the-point-of-nauseating father once gangbanged a girl and this funny-looking man may be my brother.”

“Funny looking?”

“In a cute way.”

“I’m funny looking in a cute way?”

Gilia leaned toward me. “Don’t you understand, Sam. You’re my wake-up call.”

***

Some people, especially women, put tremendous stock in eye contact. These people, especially women, have the strange notion that by locking their eyes to yours and staring deep into your soul via the cornea and pupil they can detect a mistruth. Or even the smallest hint of insincerity.

Personally, I don’t buy the gig. It may work on amateurs and children, but the pros are well aware of the eyeball-to-eyeball test. When she bullshits, Lydia is the queen of sincerity. She’ll get up breath-smelling close, gaze solemnly into the sucker’s eyes, sometimes even touch his hand with hers, and lie like a dog. Conversely, honesty makes her so uncomfortable that she disguises it behind glib patter. I learned at an early age to distrust her when she tries to tell the truth and believe her when she doesn’t.

Hank Elkrunner says the Blackfeet consider it rude to look at a person you are speaking to or a person who is speaking to you. Beyond rude, it just isn’t done. I asked him if all Indians practice this custom and received a short but direct diatribe on the white’s stupid belief that all Indian tribes are the same.

“I don’t know anyone but Blackfeet,” Hank said. “You want Apache taboos, call Hollywood.”

Gilia obviously did not follow Blackfeet tradition. Her blue eyes bored into me with the intensity of a lunch whistle. Made my stomach flutter and my brain feel like I was inhaling pure oxygen from a tank. She had a way of cocking her head to one side, as if to give herself a new angle on the truth. Suddenly it became very important that she not find me wanting.

When Gilia finally looked away and I was once again able to see the world around us, the two children had disappeared along with the woman in the red Volkswagen bus. A healthy couple rode down the street on bicycles. An older woman in a tweed sweater walked a cat on a leash. It seemed like a long time had passed since Gilia got into my car. I imagined the autumn leaves were redder than they’d been before we locked eyes.

“Why choose today to start popping in on your possible fathers?” she asked.

Why choose today? It’d been twenty years since I learned they existed. I couldn’t recall why I hadn’t acted earlier.

“My wife left me last week. She ran off with the pool man.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

I shrugged, keeping up a brave front. “I don’t handle grief well, so my daughter stole these old yearbook photos Lydia cut out of the boys who did her.”

“Your mother knew who raped her?”

“She never told me. Shannon—that’s my daughter—went to the library and researched the names and addresses. She thought I would cope better if I had something to do.”

Gilia’s mouth opened slightly and her pink tongue pressed against her upper front teeth in one of those gestures people do when they’re thinking. She said, “You’re turning the lives of five men and their families upside down because your daughter thinks you need something to do?”

“That’s a harsh way to put it.”

“How would you put it?”

I didn’t answer. The truth was I hadn’t given much thought to the men or their families. I hadn’t given much thought to anything. The search for an unknown father seems to be a primal drive. An instinct.

“How do the men react when you appear on their front porch dredging up old sins and claiming to be a son?”

“Billy Gaines wants to do lunch.”

“Billy Gaines works for Dad. It’s hard to picture him raping a flea.”

“Babe Carnisek denies the possibility.”

Her head did the cock thing again. “He denies what he did to your mother?”

“No, Babe seems kind of proud of that, which is odd. What he denies is that anyone who looks like me could possibly be related to him. Says I’m too scrawny for his son.”

I paused in case Gilia wanted to disagree with scrawny. “Your father threatened legal action and Skip Prescott is ready to hire a hit man.”

“Why?”

I shrugged again. “They think I want something from them.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

The woman walking the cat came back from wherever they’d been. She—the woman—was duck toed and wore white sneakers with the kind of hose that only cover the ankles. The cat on the leash was mostly white with black markings. Three feet were white and one black. Like all cats, she reminded me of Alice, which put me dangerously close to depression.

To fight the depression, I looked back at Gilia’s face. There was a small freckle or birthmark in that little dimple between the inside of her right eye and the bridge of her nose. I had an almost irresistible urge to touch it. Often I get irresistible urges to commit inappropriate acts, and if I don’t mount resistance, the urge can lead to a terrible social blunder.

“You said five guys,” Gilia said.

“The fifth was a black halfback named Jake. I haven’t spoken to him yet.”

Gilia stopped leaning against the door and sat up. “Why did you leave the black one for last?”

“I don’t know.” Why had I left the black one for last? Ever since I was thirteen and learned I had five possible fathers, I’d had the feeling he was the one. I suppose it came from some romantic notion that I was special—that the world-famous author with the tortured soul would always be an outsider. Different. Unique. I like to feel unique.

“When are you going to see him?” Gilia asked.

“This afternoon, I guess. Might as well hit them all now as later.”

She touched my arm, below the elbow. It was the most surprising thing that had happened all day. “Can I come with you?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

Her tongue showed on her teeth again. She sat staring at me until I thought she’d forgotten the question, then she said, “I want to see the process.”

“The process?”

“I want to see you when you tell it.”

That brought up so many questions I couldn’t ask any of them. There was nothing to do but drive the car.