Sorrow Floats (11 page)

She’d have gotten away with that if not for a Spanish-looking busboy who was hovering nearby. He said, “KRMC.”

“Pardon me?”

“KRMC has him just before ‘Lobo Sports Shorts.’”

I turned back to Dorothea. Notice how polite I came on with the pardons and pleases. “Please, would you mind changing the station for a few minutes? I’d like to hear Paul Harvey.”

“Yes, I mind.”

“You’re interested in alfalfa futures?”

“I’m not interested in changing the station.”

From polite, I moved to understanding. “I notice you are varicosed. Being pleasant to customers might increase your tips and you could afford to have your legs stripped.”

She pointed the wet pencil tip at my face. “Don’t be getting snappy with me, little girl. You’re from out of state.”

Lloyd and Shane chose not to participate in the exchange. Intrusive son of a bitch that he was, even Shane knew not to step between two irritated cat women. But I was more than irritated, I was fed up. Last-straw city. People had been pushing me and stepping on me and tearing at me for weeks, and Stuckey’s was the place to stop it.

I said, “I demand Paul Harvey.”

“You can demand all day, honey, but you can’t have him.”

As Dorothea turned back to the kitchen, I screamed.

Remember Estelle Parsons in
Bonnie and Clyde
? She was subtlety personified compared to my howl. All activity on the dining side, the curio side, and, I’d bet, out in the parking lot came to a halt. Even the little boy in the ladies’ room shut up.

I didn’t stop with the scream, either, but kept up a series of bloodcurdlers. I learned my scream from Dothan’s father, who used to call in coyotes by cutting toes off rabbits. Rabbits can really scream.

Dorothea dropped her pencil and covered both ears with her hands. She shouted, “What’s wrong with her?”

Shane stopped gorging himself long enough to raise his voice. “Hysterical digitalis. Her mind must be fed Paul Harvey’s voice once daily or she goes insane. If you have some liquid Demerol handy, we might be able to calm her down.”

“We got no liquid whatever you said. Shut her up, she’s scaring the customers.” Which was true. All except the man with three toothpicks. He looked bored, a seen-it-all type with a reputation to uphold.

Shane wiped the grease off his mouth with a napkin. “The alternative would be to tune in Paul Harvey.”

***

Paul wasn’t worth much that day, anyway. All Watergate and a pithy story about his crusty neighbors in the Ozarks—one of those wisdom-of-simple-rural-folk deals. He didn’t even give a daily bumper snicker.

Dear Dad,

The Indians in the picture are Navajo or Zuni or something, one of those tribes Hank calls Blanket Boys. He says anyone whose ancestors didn’t charge bareback across the plains killing buffalo is a wimp. Whatever they are, the sight of turquoise gives ’em a hard-on. They’re like pickup truck-driving dope dealers, only these guys deal blue rocks.

It takes all kinds.

Maurey

***

“You want to try your hand at driving?” We stood—or Lloyd and I stood while Shane sat—in the Stuckey’s parking lot, looking upwind at New Mexico. About all I could see between us and the mountains was brush and highway and used Pampers. Sparkles from broken beer bottles lined the road, giving a bleak fairy-tale look to things.

“Sure, I want to drive. Listening to his blather could bore a person back into a coma.”

Shane smiled up at me. He was relieving his fluids bag on the rear tire of a white Thunderbird with California plates. I took it as a political statement. Shane was smug because he’d hustled me for a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies based on that hysterical digitalis rap. I’d have gotten Paul Harvey without his help.

“You ever drive a stick shift?” Lloyd asked. “Moby’s steering is somewhat loose, takes muscle on the turns, especially to the right.”

“I can turn Dick. You’re worn out. Hop in back with the pervert and take a nap.”

“Sharon used to love this ambulance. I can understand why she left me. I was a drunk like you are now, but I’m still surprised she left Moby Dick.”

“Women don’t marry cars,” Shane said as he wheeled over to the side doors for load-up. “You think houses and drapes and dinette sets mean more to them than people, but get down to it, and men are the only gender can have meaningful relationships with objects.”

“It has a manual choke,” Lloyd said. “Are you familiar with the manual choke?”

Driving Moby Dick was a trip. Where the ignition should have been there was nothing but a blue wire, a red wire, and a switch. The stick shift was a four-foot rod with a hollowed-out nine ball stuck on top. Made changing gears into a sport. Reverse was where I expected first, which led to initial grinding that almost lost me the wheel. Lloyd would have taken it back, but he really was worn out from driving all night. The Jesus eyes were more puppy-after-electroshock. Or what I imagine puppy-after-electroshock would look like.

He didn’t nap in back with Shane but took over the passenger seat to keep an eye on me. Maybe he thought I had a hidden bottle and would drink on the job. If so, Lloyd was wrong. After a bottle makes me good and sick, I swear off forever, which generally becomes ten or twelve awake hours. Not long by AA One-Day-at-a-Time standards, but for most of those ten hours, sincerity is my middle name.

Every now and then after Dad died I took a shot at quitting completely. I didn’t tell anyone because they’d give me guff and know if I failed. If you can’t do something, it’s best to pretend you don’t want to. The extended sobriety spells were generally kicked off at the end of a several-day binge-out when I did something so disgusting, so bottom-of-the-slime-barrel, that I turned on myself.

The last time was in March when I was faking constipation so I could drink behind a locked door, and I dropped my Yukon on the bathroom floor and broke the bottle. Without even thinking, I grabbed an old hand towel, soaked up the liquid, and proceeded to suck that dirty rag dry. Cut the crap out of my tongue on broken glass.

After that I made a deal with God, but he let down his end of the gig, which was to give me strength, so I let down my end, which was don’t drink.

“Where’d you learn to scream like that?” Lloyd asked.

I told him about Garth Talbot and the coyotes and rabbits. “He sold the coyote pelts for bounty and used the rabbits to make jackalopes. You may not have noticed, but every jackalope in Teton County is missing two or three toes.”

Shane was popping cookies like he was in a competition. “Are you aware that if you slice the big toe off a person you effectively cripple him just as completely as I was crippled when that semi-truck jackknifed on Monarch Pass?”

“What semitruck?” I asked, but it was too late. Shane was already off on the woman from Montana who’d lost a toe in a Sears Roebuck lawn mower. She liked doing it in apple trees or some-such nonsense. Taking my lesson from Lloyd, I was learning the tune-out technique. I didn’t acknowledge the words but let Shane’s sound float over me like a TV in the next room at a motel. Or say you live next to a motocross racetrack all your life, pretty soon you won’t be able to hear it. Park said the sun makes a loud roar, but we’ve all heard it all our lives and no one has ever not heard it, so no one knows it’s there. Except him.

When I met Park he was sitting under a tree in the snow, crying. His childhood dog had died back in Maine, and his mother used an ink stamp to record the dog’s paw on the letter telling Park what had happened. So, I’m bopping along and there’s this boy with curly blond hair and pretty fingers holding a letter. I sat down next to him but kept it cool by not saying anything.

He showed me the letter with his dead dog’s footprint at the bottom. He said he hadn’t cried in years and it felt kind of good to finally let go. Since then, I’ve discovered that’s what they all say when you catch them crying. “I haven’t been able to for years and it feels kind of good to finally let go.”

Sam Callahan says the cowboy code allows for tears on two occasions: when your horse dies or when you hear “Faded Love” played on twin fiddles.

With Park I took it as vulnerability beneath the hard, society-imposed shell of manhood. I was nineteen.

Park and I talked for ten hours, first in the snow, then in the student union over countless cups of coffee, then on a lobby couch at my freshman dorm. After the Dothan-Rocky Joe fiasco I guess I was ripe for a sensitive man. He told me he’d read
Siddhartha
by Herman Hesse, he listened to jazz, and my hair was the color of dolphins dancing off the New England coast. He showed me a poem about God and death that he’d never shown anyone.

I told him about a man I saw die. I told him about Frostbite and my secret warm springs and that I had a five-year-old daughter named Shannon.

We met the next day for breakfast, then we both skipped morning classes. I wanted to touch his hair and feel his lips, but after my recent history I thought it best to let Park make the first move. We must have been together two hundred hours before he held my hand. In the dark, watching
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
—he yawned and pretended to accidentally bump my fingers during the bicycle scene.

That same night he asked permission to kiss me, and I said okay.

Two weeks later he showed me a poem and asked permission for another kiss. Maurey is a nickname. My real name is Merle—after the actress Merle Oberon—and Park had rhymed Merle with pearl and girl about thirty times.

“This poem proves I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” I said, which was a first.

“Perhaps we should consider expressing our love in the physical sense,” he said.

I almost said “Fuck my eyes out,” but this was true love, right? The rules were different. This was what Sam Callahan and I had practiced for all those years ago, so that now I had found it, my innocence wouldn’t botch the deal.

We did it Park’s way. We discussed the implications, the level of commitment, the possibility of pregnancy and options thereafter, the details of us both living in dorms where intermingling was against the rules. I suspect he was stalling for time while he figured out how to lay his hands on a rubber. I had one in my purse, but I couldn’t just whip it out. You don’t do that to a boy who writes you a poem.

Finally, the selected evening arrived. His roommate was off at a debate tournament, and I could sneak up the stairs while the dorm counselor was watching
Hawaii Five-O
. Park had arranged like two dozen candles and lit so much incense the neighbors must have thought we were smoking pot. Freshman lore held that girls don’t do it unless you get them drunk, so Park paid someone to buy him a pint of peach brandy. I didn’t want to drink, I wanted to get nailed for love.

He went into the bathroom for half an hour. I took off my clothes and hopped in the sack. He came out wearing a knee-length flannel robe with a rope belt and put
The Sea
by Rod. McKuen on his roommate’s stereo. Park asked me for the third time if he was pressuring me into something I really didn’t want to do.

“I couldn’t live with myself if we did this and afterward I lost you,” he said.

I reached out and grabbed his dick through the bathrobe.

Afterward, I felt great. I don’t mean he was hot stuff or anything. He was nervous at first and couldn’t get a stiffie, then I did some advanced manipulation. He came practically on contact, but that didn’t matter. He was trainable. What mattered was how much better it had been with love involved. I got all emotional and tingly when he touched me, and just looking at the skin on his back excited me in a way Dothan couldn’t have pulled off with an hour’s worth of foreplay. Not that Dothan ever had time for foreplay.

But Park was skittish. Something hadn’t lived up to his idealism.

He got out of bed, put on his robe and tied the rope, and stood with his back to me looking out the window. “That wasn’t your first time,” he said.

I should have smelled trouble. An alert woman would have caught the scary note in his voice, but I still felt way fine and close to him. “No, was it yours?”

His sounded ready to cry again. “Of course not. I screw every girl I pick up.”

By now I knew there was a problem. “Park. Hon, you know I have a daughter. How do you think I got her?”

His shoulders slumped. “I knew you weren’t a virgin, but I didn’t expect you to be experienced. You had her so young, I hoped you’d been abused or raped against your will or something.”

“Park, it’s okay. I didn’t love him and I do love you.” I patted the bed where we’d made love.

He came and sat down next to me but didn’t touch my body. “Was I your second?”

“No.”

“Third?”

“No.”

He stood up and went into the bathroom. After a long while I got dressed, blew out the candles, and sneaked back down the stairs.

I only saw Park once more, in the cafeteria. He acted as if nothing had happened. We had one of those “Are you okay?” “Of course I’m okay,” “You sure you’re okay?” “Why wouldn’t I be okay?” conversations.

Then he dropped out of school and went home to his mother in Maine. For several days, I wanted to die. I cried and ate, cried and ate, relived every moment we’d been together in my head, imagined his touch on my arm.

One morning as I went over that crucial night for the hundredth time, it hit me. Park had said, “I hoped you’d been abused or raped.”

Fuck him. Fuck love.

I got out of bed, showered, stole some of my roommate’s makeup, and went to a fraternity party where I got drunk out of my mind and sucked off a jerk named Randy.

The next day I made two rules: 1) Avoid poets and 2) Never fuck sober.

***

You look at Lloyd in his sandals and overalls with no shirt and his brown shoe-polish-colored hair and you think he’s not the intelligent sort. But get to know him and he’s smart in the ways he needs to be smart. East of Clayton we came upon a cluster of gas stations at the Texas state line.

“Better fill up here,” Lloyd said from the passenger seat.

“We can’t be half-empty yet.”

“See these three stations in New Mexico and none up ahead in Texas. That means state gas taxes are lower here, gasoline will cost a good deal more once we cross the line.”

So I pulled over for gas and a Coke and some cashews. Shane finagled me for a pack of peanut butter-filled crackers. Lloyd looked under the hood.

“Give me the map,” Shane said.

I’d already studied it and knew the way to I-40. “We’re not lost.”

“I enjoy knowing where I am at all times. It keeps me oriented.”

I pretended to ignore him. I was approaching hour fifteen without alcohol—hour six of being awake—and the familiar knot was forming below my sternum. The skin on my forehead was tightening, and my breasts were nervous. I didn’t need a drink yet, maybe, although I wouldn’t have turned one down, I guess, but the uncomfortableness and unfairness made me cranky.

“Lassie, would you please pass along the map?”

“Are you faking Irish roots or calling me a TV dog?”

A
Popular Mechanics
sailed into the windshield. “Why must every exchange be such a struggle with you, woman? Simply hand over the damn map.”

He was right. No use being a jerk about it. I held the map toward him but out of his reach. “The name is Maurey. It’s not lassie, not honey, not little missy, and certainly not woman. See if you can say Maurey.”

He glared at me. Lloyd opened the door and climbed in. “Bearing on the impeller shaft is about gone, I hope they have a water pump in Amarillo, ” he said.

“Maurey, will you pretty-please mind passing the map back here?” Shane asked.

I gave it to him. “Isn’t life more pleasant when you’re polite?”

“Up your heinie with a stick.”

One reason I was cranky was the heat. We’d moved in and out of spring in Colorado—I slept through it—and now we’d entered summer. Jackson Hole doesn’t prepare a person to deal with heat. Sweat trickles into my eyes and down my ribs. I get paranoid that my crotch stinks.

“Keep an eye on the temperature gauge,” Lloyd said. “We might have to stop and drive at night.”

The thought of getting stuck in this oven-ugly barren country made me crave whiskey. “I’m not stopping for nobody.”

Twenty miles or so from Dalhart we passed a billboard that said
Double Aught Ranch
with a sideways figure eight thing under the words. The next fence post had a dead rabbit hung on it, then the next a dead bird—crow, I think—then the next a dead armadillo. Every fence post on the right side of the road was decorated by something dead and decaying.

“This is gross,” I said.