Sorrow Floats (20 page)

I swallowed a Coke bottle top. Shane pulled out his little knife and said, “You need a tracheotomy.” Then I lay on the floor while he cut my throat.

***

I slept on my back using an old army blanket as a pad and Jesus as my pillow. Around dawn I blinked awake and looked at the fuzzy light on Moby Dick’s ceiling. Oklahoma, I thought. Andrew slept with his head on my left shoulder and Owsley slept with his head on my right. I thought, Gee, Owsley has gorgeous hair. Look at how the highlights shine when he breathes.

Then it hit.

“Owsley!” I sat up fast and
clonked
both boys’ heads on the blanket.

“You aren’t here,” I said.

He came to his knees sleepily and wet his lips with his tongue. His eyes were the silver-gray color of aspen ashes. “I’m here.”

“You aren’t supposed to be here. How did you get here?”

“He slid out from under the junk pile after you passed out,” Marcella said.

“Went to sleep.”

She sat with her back against the far wall, nursing Hugo Jr. “He said you said he could come.”

“I said no such thing.”

Shane pulled himself around the passenger seat to face back. “Tsk, tsk, another alcohol blackout.”

That’s another problem with drinking. People can claim you forgot something you didn’t forget and you’re supposed to trust their memory over your own.

“I didn’t black out anything, I never said a word to him about coming with us.”

Owsley kept his eyes down. “You said there’s always room for one more in the ambulance. When people in trouble travel together they have to take care of each other.”

“I said that to Critter.”

“I’m in more trouble than she is.” His lower lip kind of quivered, and his hair hung in that limp dejection thing that women use to look forlorn. Men shouldn’t be allowed to express themselves with their hair.

I was confused, but then I’m always confused before I’ve brushed my teeth. “We can’t take on a runaway boy, Freedom will call the Highway Patrol.”

“Not a likely supposition,” Shane said.

Owsley brushed hair behind his ears. “Freedom don’t care about me. He had Mary Beth claim me for Aid to Dependent Children, but the social worker found out she was only three years older than me and cut us off. Now, Freedom don’t care what I do.”

“Mary Beth is…”

“Critter. He was mad on account of he got ripped off in Dallas and the truant lady come out to the house. Last thing he’d do is call the law to fetch me back.”

I looked from Marcella to Shane. The brother-sister duo seemed to take for granted we’d added a passenger. Where was Lloyd, anyway, and why were we stopped in the country? Outside was hardwoods and bird sounds and the distant chug of a pump. One disorienting day sliding into another.

“We have to take him back,” I said.

Owsley raised his eyes. “I ain’t going back to Freedom.”

“Yes, you are.”

Shane pulled himself farther around. Owsley and I were directly behind his seat, so he had to twist his chins to peer at us. “Maurey, stop your yammering and think about it.”

The back side of my brain knew Owsley was here for the duration, but the front side rebelled. I wasn’t that much against having him, I just wanted some illusion of control over these changes. When things come at you like rockets the tendency is to cower down and refuse to be moved—but Shane was right. Freedom was an evil son of a bitch, and anyone we could save from his clutches had to be saved. He’d already traded his girlfriend’s sex for drugs; how long till he traded his son’s?

I hated it when Shane was right.

Owsley broke the quiet. “I’ll get out and walk from here, just don’t send me back to Dad.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “One more mouth to feed won’t make much difference.”

Shane did a throat-clearing guttural sound. “There’s another reason Freedom won’t be anxious to drag our band back to Comanche.”

I could see a red-brick farmhouse off through the trees. “Where is Lloyd, anyway? Does he know we picked up an extra lost soul?”

Any silence in Moby Dick was eerie, but this silence out-eeried the norm. Andrew slept, Hugo Jr. nursed, everyone else feigned distraction.

Shane broke first. He never could deal with silence. “You are to blame, Maurey. Normally, I’m not the type to say ‘I told you so,’ but in this case I will make an exception.”

“Where’s Lloyd? Is he okay?”

Marcella switched tits. “Lloyd took some beer off to trade for gasoline and food. I hope he comes back soon, before someone sees us and calls the police.”

I felt nauseous, like the post-nausea nausea you feel at the first inkling of pregnancy.

“Pass my creel back here,” I said.

“Freedom took your money,” Owsley said.

“Just hand me the damn creel.”

“I was hiding in back and heard him. I couldn’t have stopped him; if I’d tried, he would have the money and me.”

I stared into Dad’s creel. Not only was the cash gone, but the jerk took my Ortho-Novum wheel. I spoke rashly. “I’m stuck in godforsaken hell with six people I don’t like and a hundred cases of cow piss.”

Hurt leapt into Marcella’s eyes. Shane snapped, “You like Lloyd, and it’s only ninety-eight cases now.”

Screaming would not have accomplished anything. Instead, I descended into a great calm, the calm that comes between knowing something bad happened and believing it. Everything that could go wrong had, which meant I was in safe harbor. To analyze the deal to death, I was almost relieved. Freedom had given me an excuse to drink.

***

I popped open the side cargo doors. “Time for me to take a walk.”

Shane lectured. “Did I say you would lose the money? Did I say you are much too incompetent to be trusted?”

“Fuck off, Shane,” I said quietly.

“Why is it whenever a woman makes a dreadful error her first reaction is to tell a man to fuck off?”

Outside Moby Dick, I turned right, instinctively heading for Wyoming. But Hugo Sr. lurked in that direction, watching over us like an Oldsmobile-shaped vulture. The man was getting on my nerves. Left led nowhere, which seemed appropriate at the time. I picked up a fairly big stick because Jackson Hole doesn’t have rattlesnakes and I have an irrational fear of the buggers. People who live in a town without grizzly bears develop an irrational fear of grizzly bears. It’s part of Sam Callahan’s displaced-persons theory.

When Sam and Lydia moved out from North Carolina they had no background for treeless vistas or seven months of snow or even horses. As a result, Sam used to make a major deal out of alienation. He wrote a story about a boy named Tippy who flew to the Land of Oz, and when the Munchkins asked what he wanted to eat, he said, “Grits and eggs.” They brought him kitten heads on rice.

If you asked me, Sam leaned too heavily on Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land—used it as an excuse for weird behavior around women.

The one thing stranger than waking up in a strange land is waking up in a strange land without any money. Made me feel vulnerable. The stick didn’t feel like any stick I’d ever felt, the pavement was made of shiny stuff I’d never seen in pavement, the humidity was suffocating. Back home we keep our air and water separate.

The question that reared above all others: Would this have happened if Frostbite hadn’t killed Dad? Would I have taken to naming bottles or driven with my baby on the roof? Or say I had done that stuff, and Dothan had banished me from child and home, would I have gone to Dad for help? Would he have helped? He got really mad for a while when I was thirteen and pregnant, called me a whore, which is understandable considering the situation, but then he walked away from me until the day Shannon was born. Wouldn’t the high-quality father have said “You’re a whore, Maurey, but I love you anyway. Come home and I’ll take care of you”?

I’m not comfortable questioning Dad’s perfection. In fact, deep questions in general make me nervous. My former true love, Park, used to go on long walks where he contemplated the universe and took stock in himself.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” he said. Sam Callahan agreed, although he claimed Park stole the line. Personally, I think the line’s a crock. People who spend all their time wondering how they’re doing are like these tourist photographers who exert so much effort taking pictures they can’t see what they’re looking at.

***

Lloyd walked toward me carrying a red five-gallon can and a brown paper bag. The weight of the can had him leaned over to one side. His hair was mussed up, making him look for all the world like a scarecrow with an Adam’s apple.

“Won’t make Carolina on five gallons for two cases,” I said.

“This should carry us into Arkansas. Coors is worth more there.”

“It’s also illegal. I don’t do well in jails.”

“There’s worse places.” Lloyd didn’t elaborate, so I used my fertile imagination. The only place I could think of worse than jail would be jail in Arkansas. Or the drunk tank, which is a subspecies of jail. I’ve heard some grisly stories about life in the drunk tank.

Lloyd said, “Farmer was milking or I’d never’ve got the gasoline. He said his wife would make him sleep in the barn if she caught him trading necessaries for beer. She wears a white feather on her Sunday dress to signify that alcohol has never crossed her lips.”

“Sounds like an unpleasant woman.”

As we walked back to Moby Dick he gave me the bag and shifted the gas can to his free hand. “I wouldn’t have lost Sharon if I wore the white feather.”

“You’d never have met her if you hadn’t been drunk,” I pointed out.

Lloyd didn’t disagree. He hardly ever disagreed with much of anything. He was like the Tar Baby in the Uncle Remus stories who sat there taking each punch until his attacker was absorbed and beaten.

“Lloyd, have you ever been without money before?”

He nodded. “A few times. It’s no big thing.”

“Dothan worries about money constantly, and Lord knows ranchers live one step ahead of or behind the bank, but that’s for mortgages and truck payments and stuff. I’ve never been in a place where I had no money at all.”

“We’re not going to starve.”

I stayed alert for rattlesnakes. “How do you know?”

Lloyd rubbed his leg as he walked. “Only free people in the country are the filthy rich and the filthy poor. Everyone else is in debt.”

“I’d rather be filthy rich.”

“Surviving without money will give you confidence, make you feel self-sufficient. You could use some confidence.”

“I could call my friend Sam Callahan collect, have him wire out some money.”

Lloyd’s eyes squinted as if he were looking beyond what I could see. “It’s not healthy to get rescued every time you make a mistake. You tend to forget actions have consequences.”

“Is that from one of your AA books?”

Moby Dick came in sight. “Just because it’s in a book doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Taking advice from a book makes me feel run of the mill, like my problems are so common they can be tossed aside by words from a bumper sticker. Same thing happens when I go to the doctor and he says what I have is going around.

Lloyd nodded up the road at Hugo Sr.’s Oldsmobile. “Besides, can’t hurt to have the cavalry a hundred yards off the rear.”

***

When we got back to the ambulance, Andrew and Marcella were outside having a fight. He said she’d put his shoes on the wrong feet, and she said she hadn’t. Marcella patiently explained big toes in, little toes out, but Andrew wasn’t interested.

“When I walk they’re crooked. If you make me walk with backwards shoes all day I’m gonna ride with Daddy.”

Sounded good to me. “The shoes are okay, but your T-shirt is inside out and backwards,” I said. “See the tag?”

I touched the tag on his throat, and when he looked down to see if it was true I
plonked
his nose with my finger—one of Dad’s favorite tricks. Andrew got upset and called me
stupid
.

“Are you carrying drugs?” Marcella said to Owsley. “We had a girl said she wasn’t, but she was.”

“I hate drugs. Only scums use drugs.”

“You might have pounds of heroin on your person.”

“Lady, where would I hide pounds of heroin?” Owsley made sense on that one. He’d escaped Freedom with a dirty pair of corduroys, his art pad, and a chunk of charcoal. If we stopped at a No Shoes, No Shirt—No Service joint, we’d have to root through the clothes pile before we took him indoors.

“You better not contaminate my babies,” Marcella said. “They aren’t sophisticated like you, this family was raised on fried okra and Jesus.”

Andrew yelped. “I hate okra.”

No one was happy with the contents of Lloyd’s breakfast bag—three catfish and two dozen fried cornmeal globs he called hush puppies, the theory being if you threw one at a barking dog, it would shut up.

I was justifiably cranky. “I can’t function without coffee. Don’t expect me to drive.”

Shane ate six or seven of the yellow globs, whining through every bite. “You promised you’d find Oreos. I’m a sick man, I deserve to eat what I want. Cold catfish is beneath my dignity.”

I said, “Everything is beneath your dignity.”

Andrew took one bite of hush puppy, screamed, “Onions!” and commenced to dry heave. Marcella cupped her hand under his mouth while she patted him between the shoulder blades and chirped, “Spit it up, honey. Spit it up.”

When I said no one was happy I forgot Owsley and the cat. Those two went to town on the catfish.

I noticed Lloyd didn’t eat anything. I think his feelings were hurt by the abuse we heaped on breakfast. It’s probably not easy to approach a farmhouse at dawn with two cases of beer. As he poured gasoline into Moby Dick’s tank, I asked, “How’s it look?”

He saved enough to prime the carburetor. “I need a meeting.”

“I’d rather have coffee.”

Shane broke into a song called “Me and Bobby McGee,” the line that goes, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Nobody laughed.

Group morale rose considerably in De Queen, Arkansas, where each of us in the ambulance fulfilled short-term needs. Lloyd circled town streets named after Indian tribes until he found an American Legion hut with a nine a.m. AA meeting. I have no idea how he found meetings in unfamiliar towns; he must have a nose for alcoholics the way I have a nose for alcohol.

Lloyd and Shane did the chair-up-steps deal and disappeared for a few minutes, then Lloyd came back out with two Styrofoam cups of coffee for me and a box of store-bought doughnuts for the boys. Owsley drank some of my coffee, and I ate one of his doughnuts. Andrew tried climbing the sandstone rock wall of the hut, reached an exposure of a foot and a half, and took a leader fall. Marcella shoved Hugo Jr. into my arms and ran over to do the comfort routine. I guess her short-term needs were fulfilled too, because, far as I could tell, all she needed was to mother.

She didn’t need coffee or sugar or whiskey or Hugo Sr. It’s somewhat spooky meeting a woman who isn’t addicted to substances. Me, I’m addicted to everything, except cigarettes. Lydia Callahan set such a good bad example that I managed to avoid that habit. And tranquilizers—Mom turned me against pills that transform the brain into a potted plant. And cocaine, and marijuana. Maybe I wasn’t as addicted as I thought.

If God had descended to GroVont and said “Maurey Talbot, thou art strung out on alcohol, coffee, and men. Thou must this moment choose one and stop two,” I’d have stopped alcohol and men in a heartbeat.

“Who told you bald eagles have bald legs?” Owsley asked.

“My dad. I must have been nine years old, we took a pack trip up Crazy Woman Creek and came on a bald eagle feeding on a baby elk carcass. Dad had me list every field mark different from a golden.”

“When I was nine my dad taught me how to mix a gram of pure LSD with a gram of PCP to make six thousand hits of mescaline.”

***

Up to that point I’d avoided any personal attachment with Hugo Jr. When you’ve recently been stripped of a one-year-old, the last thing you want is a one-month-old calling in the memories. But H.J. was a lovable little bug. No hair to speak of, wide blue eyes, a nose so tiny you could have hidden it beneath a pop bottle cap—some people say kids all look alike till their third month, but I protest that broad statement. I get off on tykes so young they can’t hold their head up.

Here’s the difference between having a baby in 1964 and having a baby in 1972: Pampers. When she was four months I accidentally stuck a safety pin in Shannon’s thigh. Scream, I thought the girl would never stop screaming. Sam Callahan forbade me from ever changing her again. I felt so awful I couldn’t face cheerleading practice. I suppose an alert psychiatrist would have tabbed me as a future child abuser right then.

Marcella appeared in my reverie. “I’m gonna take Andrew inside, find a bathroom to clean him up. You okay with Hugo Jr.?”

“We’re buds.”

“If he gets fussy, pacify him with a tit.”

“But I’ve been dry for over a month.”

She wrinkled her nose. “By the time he figures that out, I’ll be back with the real thing.”

You don’t need women’s intuition to figure what happened next. The moment Marcella dragged Andrew, kicking and screaming, through the door, Hugo Jr.’s macaroni noodle fingers formed fists, his face turned Shane’s-nose red, and he went into high wail.

“She said to put him on a tit,” Owsley said.

“You just want to see my boob. I know how boys your age are.”

Owsley spit on the ground in disgust. “I saw tits every day at the house in Comanche. Yours won’t be a thrill.”

I always thought nursing somebody else’s baby would be like chewing somebody else’s gum, but it wasn’t gross like that at all. Whatever instincts a woman has come out in nursing, I suppose, although I’ve known women who hate it. Lydia Callahan says nursing is nature’s way of making you droop.

When I offered Hugo Jr. the right side he latched on natural as a foal on a mare. The effect was truly bewildering, on one hand breathtaking, like being part of something primeval, while on the other hand the ache below my breast for my own baby was almost more than I could stand. That ache separated into an ache for Dad, then an ache for what I’d missed with Mom, then an ache that kind of billowed out to include everything wonderful and impossible about life.

I looked down at Hugo Jr.’s closed eyelids and his upper lip on my breast. The areola was almost back to normal, pre-baby size, but at his touch my nipple hardened, as if the last year hadn’t happened. His eyebrows were delicate as a spider web, and the hollow atop his head looked so vulnerable. They put an IV in Auburn’s head the day he was born—I cried for six hours.

Hugo Jr. brushed my skin with his hands, and the aches formed into one bubble that rose to my throat and burst. I touched his tiny nose and connected.

Damn, I thought to myself, the first step back. I’d hoped to avoid this at least until fall.

***

When Marcella returned with the newly scrubbed Andrew to feed Hugo Jr. honest mother’s milk, I walked the hundred yards west to where Hugo Sr. sat in his car eating a Stewart sandwich. I couldn’t get over what a block-shaped person he was, like a 1950s sci-fi robot. Square chest, block chin, nose like a quarter-stick of butter imbedded in his face—I hadn’t seen any of that in Hugo Jr.

“Loan me twenty dollars,” I said.

He chewed with his mouth slightly open, staring up the road at the American Legion hut. “Was Andrew hurt bad? I’d never have let him climb that building if I was there.”

“You are here, Hugo. Loan me twenty dollars so I can buy your kid milk.”

“She’ll never manage without me.”

“She’s done fine so far.”

He glanced at me in his window. “Make her come back to Dumas and I’ll give you the twenty dollars.”

“You think I’d sell out my friends for twenty bucks?”

“Okay, thirty.”

***

Yellowstone has millions of trees, and they’re so thick in the Bitterroot you can’t ride a horse off trail, but the mountains around Jackson Hole and GroVont are way-high deserts with loads of open space between stands. I need open space. Denseness gives me claustrophobia.

Arkansas was the densest land I’d ever seen. The trees and shrubs, flat shimmering with fertility, were pressed from all sides by intense humidity and these low, off-gray clouds. Driving Moby Dick up, down, and around the hills was like swimming through a lake of sperm.

We passed an unpainted house with a full-width screened porch and three little black kids playing next to a garden. The two girls had yellow ribbons in their hair, and the boy was riding a stick horse with a stuffed-sock head. I knew a few jocks at Laramie who were black—even got nailed by Kareem, who kept score—but I’d never hung out around black children. They seemed exotic and sleek, like palomino horses. I wondered if they felt the heat and humidity the same as I did. Would that shiny skin attract or repel mosquitoes, and did black boys get stiffies younger than white boys?

All through high school this rumor floated around that Sam Callahan’s father was black. The rumor was based mostly on misconceptions that develop in places where blacks are rare to nonexistent. Sam ate southern foods, natural enough since he was from the South, but people didn’t see it that way. They said, “Cornbread! Why, he must be part nigger.”

He liked Sam Cooke music, and later Jimi Hendrix. He liked basketball better than football. He said “y’all” when he meant “you guys.” Pretty flimsy fodder to brand the boy, but in a town small as GroVont flimsy fodder is enough. Knocking me up at thirteen didn’t help.

To tell the truth, Sam more or less encouraged the black daddy theory, especially when he got older and started dating.

“I want the girls swept away by the soul man stereotype,” he said to me.

“You want them swept away by the big dick stereotype.”

Actually, Sam’s dick isn’t that bad for a little guy.

One time Lydia fed us this long gang-bang story involving five football players—four whiteys and a black halfback—who got her drunk and raped her and peed on her face on Christmas Eve. She used the story as an example of all-men-are-pigs and said any of the five could be Sam’s father. Sam used the story as an excuse to alienate himself from the entire male sex.

“What’d you and Hugo Sr. find to talk about?” Marcella asked.

“He offered thirty bucks for you.”

“You think I should go back to him for the sake of the boys?”

“Staying with a bad man for the sake of children is the single stupidest move any woman ever made.”

“You’re always so certain, Maurey. I wish I was more like you. I’m never certain about anything.”

Shane was busy on the maps again. “We shall cross the river at Memphis,” he said. “I have a cohort from the music industry in Memphis. Elvis stayed with the stage when I quit to pursue my studies in medical school.”

“That’s Elvis Presley, no doubt,” I said.

“You’ve heard of him? He was a struggling artist until I taught him to swivel his pelvis with the downbeat.”

“Yeah, right. Was Elvis there when you nailed Katharine Hepburn on a horse?”

“No, but I did introduce him to his wife. Sweet girl, I dated her first, you know.”

“I read that somewhere.”

“Your sarcasm is quite gauche, little lady. No wonder you can’t hold a man.”

***

Between hills we passed a bunch of swampy-looking rivers. Stagnant brown water makes for bad fly-fishing. “Lloyd,” I say, “I understand about needing whiskey or food or oil, or even love. Heck, Dothan needs help with his income tax form. What I don’t understand is needing a meeting. What happens to fill a need at these meetings?”

The lines around his eyes looked like a topo map. “We talk.”

“No good ever came from talking.”

The eyes shifted focus to me. “Why not come to a meeting and see?”

I didn’t say anything for two bridges. “No, thanks, I could never deal with truth while drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups.”

He shrugged and faced forward. “Be on the lookout for someplace I might be able to trade for gasoline. We’ll be low soon.”

“Gauge says we’re full.”

“That gauge always says we’re full.”

***

Funny I hadn’t noticed that before.