Western Swing (19 page)

I grabbed his hand, “Cool it, Bug. C'mon, Ann, the waitress has a special cracker tool—a crumb vacuum or something.”

“She might get mad if she sees what we let him do.”

“What do you care if the waitress gets mad? She's paid to put up with kids and we'll never see her again.”

Ann looked up from her napkin of bread crumbs. “I just don't want to make anyone mad.”

I shut up and ate my fried shrimp. Usually I prefer shrimp sautéed or boiled, but death in the family makes people do things a little differently. I couldn't get over Mom calling me a son of a bitch. What kind of an attitude is that? Son of a bitch. You'd think I grew up to be a hit man or something.

Back in her side of the booth, Ann folded the crumby napkin in a square and pressed it into the table next to a box of white and pink sugar packets. “Your mother was angry with you.”

“No kidding.”

“I wasn't comfortable around her. I mean, she broke a window and scared Buggie. My mother never broke a window.”

“She was angry with everyone. It must be tough, losing a kid like that—even for my mother.”

Ann knocked on the bottom of the table. “She seemed especially angry with you.”

“I don't blame her. Look at the breading on this shrimp, must be a half inch thick. You wade through all this breading to find a tiny little shrimp under there.”

Ann looked sympathetically at my shrimp. “I don't see how they get away with that.” It was a small shrimp. “Here, have some linguini.” She shoved her plate across the table. I shook my head, so she offered Buggie a bite. He held both hands over his mouth.

“Why didn't you write her all those years?” Ann asked.

“Are you saying I'm a bad person? 'Cause if you are, I can't disagree.” Ann hardly ever criticized me. She didn't have the self-confidence.

“Of course not, Loren. You're a good person. Nobody is saying you're bad. I just wonder why you didn't stay in touch when you left home. I'd be hurt if Buggie treated me like you treated your mother.”

I spit out a shrimp tail. For some reason I've always put the whole last bite of shrimp in my mouth and sucked on the tail, then spit it out. Like a cherry and a cherry pit. “I wanted to forget all that.”

Buggie reached into Ann's linguini and pulled out a clam.

“Bet,” he said.

Ann took the clam. “That's not a pet, Buggie, it's a clam.”

Buggie let out a howl that made the other customers turn. I could see the looks—
child abusers. Baby beaters.
A kid turns into a pitiless blackmailer the second you take him out in public.

Ann gave in. “So keep the clam already.” Buggie grasped it with both hands and smiled, which in Buggie was rare enough to make us both stop eating.

“Forget all what?” Ann asked.

How to explain? “She's a cocktail waitress in an oil-field bar,” I started.

“Buggie, it's a shell. You can't keep it.”

“She buys records and kitchen utensils from ads on TV. She eats frozen chicken potpies—the kind with no bottom crust. And white bread. She cuts coupons from the Sunday paper. All that Chiclet chewing.” I shuddered. “None of Steinbeck's women chewed gum. No one in
Siddhartha
even went to the bathroom.”

Ann was paying more attention to Buggie than to me. “It's dead, Buggie. Put it down.” Buggie clutched the greasy clam to his heart.

“My bet.”

Ann turned back to me. “You hate your mom for chewing gum and going to the bathroom?”

I wanted to explain something complex and Neptune's Cavern wasn't the time or place. “It's a matter of class. I was real short in high school. Didn't start growing until I was almost twenty.”

“What's that got to do with Chiclets?”

“People treated me like a spook and I was miserable.”

“Make Buggie put down the clam.”

“I kind of like his pet.” Buggie studied the clam closely, muttering sounds that I couldn't understand. “Nobody thought I was neat. Women ran from me for fear I'd get attached. Don only liked Patrick. Mom kept telling me I would always fail at everything. What's its name, Buggie?”

“Don't encourage him. Your mom didn't really tell you you would fail at everything.”

“All pets have a name.”

Buggie looked at me seriously. “Mary.”

“Mary the clam. She's a good pet. Here, you eat her insides.” I reached into Mary, fingered out her meat, and popped it in my mouth. She was a tad gritty. “Now she won't stink. You can keep a glass of salt water by the bed for her to sleep in at night.”

“He can't keep a clam.” Ann tried to look severe, but she could never really be too severe with either of us. Together we had her swamped.

Buggie didn't seem to mind or notice the loss of Mary's insides. He ran his finger around the fan contour of her shell and said, “Mary.”

I ate another doughy shrimp and drank some red wine, thinking of my youth. I hardly ever think of my youth. “I started reading books,” I said. “The writers treated me with respect I didn't get at home and the characters had a class I thought everyone except the people around me had. Book characters never curl their hair or use Kleenex. Books became real and real became something to ignore.”

Ann's index finger rolled around her wineglass rim. “When Mom was sick, I used to pretend I was Nancy Drew. Nancy never had to change her mom's colostomy bag.”

Buggie held the clam like a puppet and made the two halves move up and down like lips. “Hewo, will you play with me?”
Play
came out
pway,
which could have two meanings.

“Oh God,” Ann sighed. “All we need now is an imaginary friend.”

“I think it's great. Shows imagination and adaptability that he can find friendship in a shell.”

“You still should write your mother.”

Buggie held the clam over his glass of Sprite. “I'm firsty.”

“Tell Mary what you did today,” I said.

“Foonral.”

For the next three years, Mary was Buggie's only friend and companion. They talked together, played together, slept together. My glass of salt water by the bed didn't go over. Buggie said she would drown. He didn't seem to connect that Mary once lived undersea. After months of handling, she didn't even look like a clam anymore. The ridges wore flat and smooth and Buggie's grubby thumbprint appeared at the base of each half. I thought the imaginary pal obsession would peter out when Mary's hinges fell apart, but Buggie acted as if he didn't notice. He carried both halves in his pocket and slept with them under the pillow same as ever.

“He loves that clam more than me,” Ann said.

“At least he's not lonely.”

“But a clam.”

Thinking of those three years is like thinking about a book I liked years ago, but haven't read since. I wasn't me. I was a comfortable minor character, eating, sleeping, walking from over here to over there. I stopped examining myself—which is very strange for me. I found a job cleaning bricks. The construction company I worked for would buy an old building and flatten it, then send my crew in with gloves and hammers and we'd knock all the chinking off the bricks and stack them in a truck. Most of the crew were college graduates who couldn't find jobs in their chosen field—English and sociology majors mostly. We used to discuss the whale symbolism in
Moby Dick
over our thermos bottles and plastic-wrapped sandwiches at lunch.

The best thing about a career in brick cleaning—at least in Denver—is every December the temperature drops so cold a brick shatters when you hammer it. That meant company layoffs and four months of collecting unemployment checks while I wrote Westerns. State employment commissions are the new art patrons of modern America.

In a blazing example of Unexplainable Shit, Berkley Publishing bought my first Western. I called it
Barney Runs Amok
and used Kelly Palamino as my pen name. I thought Palamino sounded like a cross between an Italian and a horse. They gave me five hundred dollars and twelve complimentary copies. I signed eight of the books and sent them to Victoria to Mom. One went to Ann's father.

Meanwhile, Ann kept the steady income flowing from her day-care job. She was very sober about her work, much more sober than I was about brick cleaning or writing. Ann thought she affected the futures of her kids. She was scared to death one would grow up to be a rapist or a suicide and it would be her fault.

Buggie grew like those crystals that explode when you drop them in water. He grew too fast. I liked him at three, I wanted him to stay three forever. Then I liked him at four, but he wouldn't stop there either. His face thinned as he aged, giving him that grown-up head on a child's body that was so popular in TV commercials back then. He demanded independence, wouldn't let Ann or me do anything for him. I remember mornings we all sat in a circle for forty-five minutes while Buggie struggled with his shoes. Just when I thought he had them on and tied, Buggie would decide the socks weren't perfect. He'd yank everything off and start all over.

Ann taught Buggie necessary stuff like colors and numbers, traffic signs, the seasons, the four food groups, but the more vital aspects of his education were in my hands. Every night after our romp, Buggie bathed and climbed into his jammies and sat on the edge of his bed with Mary perched on the night-stand, waiting for my reading of Important Works.

Being a parent is an amazing project—you're given this beautiful, fertile, empty mind and told to fill it up with any ideas you want. What power. What responsibility. No one cares if you're paranoid or racist or live in fantasyland, whatever you think matters is what you dump into this little person, where it germinates and flourishes. I chose to fill Buggie with the most noble thoughts from all the hundreds of generations who have searched for Truth. He would grow up to be the sum total of the human experience—a goal which I admit put a lot of weight on the little fellow's shoulders.

After one round of O. Henry, I spent a year on the classics—
Jason and the Argonauts
,
The Aeneid
,
The Odyssey.
I read him
Walden
and
Sand County Almanac
and
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
He loved
Slaughterhouse Five
,
though he claimed it made Mary cry. By kindergarten, Buggie had already heard every book Fitzgerald wrote. He was conversant with Bellow's
Adventures of Augie March.
He told his teacher he would laugh her out of the classroom if she pulled that Dick and Jane crap on him.

Which, of course, was ridiculous. By his fifth birthday, Buggie had stopped laughing. Stopped crying also. He didn't do anything emotional—never acted frustrated or craved hugs. He accepted what we gave him and asked for nothing else. I asked Ann if Buggie was abnormal.

“What do you mean, ‘abnormal'?”

“You're around kids all day. Are they all as isolated as Buggie?”

“Fred is not isolated, he's shy.”

“Shy is when you're afraid of people. Buggie ignores people. He ignores us.”

Ann didn't like that. “Bull, Loren. He doesn't ignore me. Buggie's just better than the other kids. He's special.”

“Then he's not normal.”

“He's special.”

We made weekend camping trips into the mountains above Boulder every summer. Winter nights we popped Jiffy Pop and played Candyland and Scrabble. The second year we installed cable TV. There was even talk of a microwave oven. What I'm trying to prove here is that I was once a regular guy. I didn't set out to wander crazed through the Wilderness, attempting to contact God. I once kept up with garbage pickup day and wrote down the mileage whenever I changed the oil in the car. For three years I behaved as I was expected to behave.

• • •

Then, one June morning when it was too pretty outside for me to clean bricks, the postman brought news that my second Western had sold. I kissed the mailbox. I ran around the yard, yee-hawing in my bathrobe until the neighbor's dog howled. The contract with its enclosed thousand-dollar check called for a significant gesture of celebration—a cake. Fireworks. Loud music and alcohol. It called for an entire day with nothing constructive attempted.

I spent most of the afternoon gathering materials, even missed my
Andy Griffith
rerun, but by 4:30 Ann's surprise was all set. I'd made a little flagpole out of three straws and taped the check to the top. This was stuck in a Safeway angel food cake and surrounded by sparklers. I peeled the outer seal on a bottle of cold duck and loosened the plastic top so one good thumb-push would pop it. Laura Nyro's “Dancin' in the Streets” circled round and round on the turntable, awaiting only my release of the tone arm to blast my secondhand speakers into pieces of crackling junk. The anticipation was so thick I had to drink a beer not to be overwhelmed.

Finally, Ann and Buggie bumped through the door and I hit it with the sparklers and Laura Nyro. The champagne bottle put up a struggle before it
banged
and foamed over onto the kitchen table, but the overall effect was one of good fortune. Ann acted properly impressed. She hugged me and admired the check and said the regular things about champagne bubbling up her nose. Only a writer's wife has to act happy when her husband earns a thousand dollars for three years' work. Buggie sat on the floor, pretending the plastic champagne top was a raft and the rug was an ocean. He swayed back and forth and made castaways-on-the-sea sounds.

“Let's spend the money quickly,” I said.

“We could put a down payment on a car.”

“I don't want a new car. I want to blow the thousand on extravagance. You and Buggie deserve some foolish fun for a change.”

Ann sipped champagne from a tumbler with
Dukes of Hazzard
characters painted on the side. “We haven't had a real vacation since our honeymoon when you got in the argument with that dead writer.”

“Faulkner.”

“Yeah, Faulkner. We could take a vacation. God knows I need one.”

“Okay, vacation time, where would you like to go?”

“Me? It's your book, Loren, you choose the place.”

“Nope, I'm giving you a dream vacation…for a thousand dollars. Name the spot.”

“I couldn't, Loren. You decide.”

Selling the Western made me feel magnanimous. Ann hardly ever got to make a decision, this seemed like the time. Besides, I was pretty sure she'd choose Zion and that's where I wanted to go, only I wanted her to say it. I'd recently read an article about an environmental writer named Everet Reuss who walked into the desert in 1934 and didn't come back—yet. Someone claimed to have seen him around 1950, but it didn't seem possible he could have lived this long. The article said Everet was the subject of much speculation and mythmaking among desert lovers. If he was dead, I figured maybe I could find him from his emanations the way a horse smells out water. I might become well-known as a Western writer and mystery solver.

“Name the spot,” I said. “This vacation is a present to you.”

Ann smiled. “Wyoming.”

“Wyoming? I thought you wanted to tour Zion and ride a mule down the Grand Canyon.”

“Deserts are too hot in the summer. I saw a picture of the Tetons in
Cosmo
last month. It was in an article called ‘Vacation-lands of the Stars.' John Travolta skied there last winter.”

“Well, we better see the place John Travolta skied.”

“You don't like Wyoming?”

“Sure, I like Wyoming. I just thought you wanted Zion.”

“Would you rather see Zion, I really don't care. We could go to Zion if you'd rather.”

“You chose Wyoming, we'll go to Wyoming.”

“Are you sure you really want to?”

“I really want to. Buggie'll like Yellowstone. He's never seen a bear.”

Ann smiled at Buggie on the floor. “Have you ever seen a bear?”

“Me? No, I haven't seen a bear either.”

Buggie turned the champagne top on its side and made gurgling, sinking noises in his throat. He looked up at us and said, “Everbody drownded.”

• • •

“All right, flip her there where the creek runs into the lake. The current will take it out a ways.”

Buggie's face scrunched into a mask of concentration. He cast with all his might, hurtling the nymph into the dirt at his feet.

“Almost,” I said. “Don't swing so hard this time and let go of the button a little sooner.”

Wordlessly, Buggie reeled in. He planted both feet and swung the rod as hard as he could. The lure shot out a couple of feet and slapped down on the water like a flattened palm.

“Let the line out, let it out. Now, watch the bobber.” Okay. I admit Buggie was fishing with a little weight and a bobber, which is bait fishing without bait. Maybe in those last three years I'd begun to compromise my strict moral standards, but, hell, Buggie was only five years old. He was too short to cast a fly line. And anyhow, the nymph was hand-tied from artificial materials. It was so tiny whoever tied it must have used a magnifying glass. Any pro will testify there's no shame in fishing with a nymph the size of a thumbnail.

“Gonna catcht a fish,” Buggie said. His alert eyes never left the red bobber as it bobbed out into Jackson Lake. I settled onto the ground and leaned back into the warm bank, fairly bursting with pride. Here I was alive and saying the ancient words—“A man's calling is to provide sustenance for women, my son. Observe, learn the skills my father passed to me as his father passed them to him, the skills you shall pass on to your son.” Lying there, watching the sun glitter on the Tetons, I felt like a bead in the necklace of history. A frame in the film of life. Hot damn for tradition.

Not that Don ever took me fishing.

“Keep the line tight,” I said, “so you can set the hook if you get a bite.” Buggie scowled, ignoring my advice.

I yawned and stretched, smug as a Siamese cat. An osprey floated low over the perfect blue water. The mountains sprang from the far side of the lake as if they'd been washed clean last night and hung up to sparkle for my enjoyment. So far the vacation had been a tremendous success. More than I could have hoped for. The Chevelle was running like a champ. The weather couldn't have been improved by God Himself. We were camped in a place called Lizard Creek Campground, a spot so perfect you'd think Disney studios hired an exterior decorator to place the stones and trees. Best of all, with the responsibility of guiding kids to normalcy off Ann's shoulders, she was relaxed and happy. I loved to see Ann happy.

That morning, for the first time ever, she stayed in bed after I got up. She lay on her back with her arms thrown over her head, almost exposing her breasts, but not quite. It was the pose of a seductress. I leaned down and kissed her awake.

“You two fish,” she murmured. “I feel like more sleep.” Ann was my best friend and partner, but it had been a long time since I thought of her as a seductress. Maybe I never had. Instead of fishing with Buggie, I had a strong wish to crawl back into the sleeping bags and hold Ann and tell her she was beautiful.

“Have fun, take care of Buggie,” she said in her near sleep.

“
Loren
.”
I must have dozed off in the sun because Buggie was kicking my foot and saying, “Loren, Loren.” He clutched the rod tight, holding it straight over his head. His face held a cross between excitement and fear that could only mean he had a fish. A couple of feet from the bank, the bobber moved down, then up, then back down again. With a jerk of the rod, it sank.

“You got one. Hell's bells, Buggie, set the hook. Reel him in slow, don't loosen the line, slow, nice and easy.”

Buggie didn't reel at all. He turned and ran up the bank with the rod, dragging a little four-inch trout across the sand and rocks, then over a sagebrush, finally bouncing him into a willow bush.