Western Swing (29 page)

How often had I used
finding myself
as an excuse to hurt people who loved me? “I wonder if Cassie's doing this to get back at me for leaving her?”

“More likely Mickey's doing it to get back at you for leaving him.” That thought caused some grief. Mickey could be a mean fucker if he got his ass up, and ravaging my daughter would be just his idea of perfect revenge.

“Did she say anything to Connie before she left?”

“Hell, I don't know. Connie's so disgusted she pretends neither one of you exists. I can't get her to talk about anything.”

I looked through the window at the softening late afternoon sky and the dying leaves. Outside was so pretty and inside was such a disappointment. I considered the people I had loved so far in my life. One daughter hates me, the other is ruining herself by following in my footsteps, my first husband blames me for every problem anyone has, my one true friend and lover is screwing my baby daughter to spite me, my present husband is sticking it to every would-be singer in Nashville—all of this caused by my good intentions. Shit, all of a sudden life was ugly.

“Are they still in Denver?” I asked.

“How the hell should I know? You traveled that circuit, you tell me.”

“If they're in Denver, they'll be playing at the Powder Keg. It's not bad compared to some of Mickey's dives.”

“I'm glad our daughter's being gang-banged in a clean bar.”

“Ron, there's no call for that. I'll fly out tonight and get her. You'll have your daughter back by tomorrow afternoon.”

Ron made a growl-laugh angry sound. “Don't fuck up again, Lana Sue.”

• • •

The Powder Keg in Denver is the junction where the country in country-western connects with the western. The dancers make the difference. From the Powder Keg to northern California, you mainly see western swing dancing. The couples twirl and dip like jitterbuggers with spot-welded hips. East of Denver, it's all two-step—a never-ending, never-varying circle of shufflers with their hands placed in wrestling holds. For me, most two-step has all the spontaneity of a McDonald's hamburger, but that may just be another anti-East Coast prejudice I picked up from Mickey.

The place is definitely big. It used to be a National Guard armory or something. The walls are made from large stones mortared together like in a rock fireplace. A long bar stretches across the back and doglegs down the east side to a dance floor about half the size of a basketball court. Strains of “San Antonio Rose” drifted from the stage as I came through the door and made a beeline for the back bar. I could hear Choosie's voice crackling on the high notes.

Cassie stood dead center in Lacy's old position. They had her dressed up real nice—a calf-length skirt that showed off her tan boots and a white ruffled blouse with a jacket that matched the skirt. Her hair hung down on both sides of her shoulders, giving Cassie this pure-ranch-girl-come-to-Sunday-school look. She held her Martin kind of high and straight parallel to the stage. I was surprised how good the band sounded with an extra rhythm guitar. The mix was deeper, fuller, her chording set Choosie's fiddle free to soar in and out of the melody line.

I ordered a double scotch with a shot of Drambuie on the side. The plan was to hang back, mix myself rusty nails, and listen awhile—work on my position in the upcoming confrontation. The counterkidnapping would not be easy. My best bet was to act ungodly angry at somebody, but who? I could hardly come on self-righteously outraged at Cassie because I'd committed the same crime myself. Twice. At least she had the sense to wait until after her eighteenth birthday. I was still statutory when Mickey ripped up my hymen. Daddy could have made things ugly if he hadn't been too embarrassed to haul me into court.

It struck me that if anyone involved was behaving like a shit, it had to be my old pal Mickey Thunder. Hiring and sleeping with my own daughter was a dirty trick, reeking of ulterior, vengeful motives. I knew what a pervert Mickey could be in bed and he knew I knew. That was what rankled. He was using and abusing my baby daughter just to goose my imagination and screw me up—the asshole.

“San Antonio Rose” ended and after a few seconds of guitar tuning, Cassie began the first line of “Echo of an Old Man's Last Ride.”

I'm gonna ride me a moonbeam, someday, gonna take it to places and scenes faraway.

Her voice startled me. When had it gotten so mature?

Gonna rope me a comet and shoot me a star

Gonna ride me a moonbeam someday.

Cassie's voice was a little deeper than mine, not so strong on the high notes, but her midrange rang out true and perfect, damn remarkable for a girl her age.

More than her beautiful voice, I was amazed by Cassie's face as she sang. Her face was alert, flushed with excitement. Her eyes bubbled with life-force.

She had always been such a calm little girl. Even at three or four years old, Cassie's self-control frightened me. All her childhood, she gave the impression of peacefully waiting for something. Never unhappy, yet never happy, she didn't seem involved in her life. Now she was transformed. Whatever she'd been waiting for had come.

Joy practically exploded from Cassie's face. Not only was she involved in the moment, she was also damn good. I couldn't believe that was my daughter on the stage, my little girl. She was five times better than I'd been at her age and twice as good as I was now. How had Mickey known? Or had he known?

At the end of the first verse, Cassie looked over at Mickey and smiled. He smiled back and nodded.

Now the next morning they found him, sitting under a tree

With his saddle and his rope by his side

His Colt .45 in his big gnarled hand

Was the echo of an old man's last ride.

So much for dragging Cassie back to Texas. She was complete, fulfilled, her face when she smiled at Mickey glowed with smitten softness. She had, at least for the moment, pulled off what I'd been scrambling after for nearly twenty years—meaningful happiness. The pleasant life. I had no right, in fact, no desire, to threaten that.

Neither Ron nor Daddy would ever understand. For them, sucking Mickey's crank and performing in smoky honky-tonks was a terrible fate no matter how much joy it brought. I'd taken my shot at that route and failed, but I sure couldn't hold it against my daughter for wanting her own chance.

As the song ended, the crowd applauded and whistled. Cassie blushed and smiled and looked eighteen again. She said, “Thank you,” into the microphone. I knew just how she felt.

Mickey leaned toward her, saying something. Cassie covered the mike with one hand and said something back to him. She turned to the drummer, then back to the audience.

“This next song is an old classic the boys had a hit with years ago, but I just learned it yesterday, so ya'll will have to bear with me.” A few people called encouragement. Cassie smiled and shook her hair back. “I'd like to dedicate this song to my dear old mama, wherever she may be and whoever she may be with. It's called ‘Raising Cain or Raising Babies.'”

If I could prove that Mickey saw me back at the bar and put her up to that one, I'd shoot the bastard.
Wherever she may be and whoever she may be with.
Jesus. The words are even worse than the title.

I turned to the bar in disgust. Cassie could outsing her mother and look more beautiful and sleep with my old boyfriend, but she didn't have to be so damn honest about the whole thing.

“You look dejected,” the guy sitting next to me said.

I hadn't noticed him before. He was skinny and wore glasses. His clothes looked slept in.

“I am dejected. That's my daughter singing that song.”

He squinted at the stage. “You should be proud of her.”

“She ran away from home. The tall sucker on the pedal steel is my old boyfriend and her new one. You ever hear anything so sick?”

“My son disappeared and my wife killed herself.”

I turned from my drink and stared at him. The guy looked vaguely familiar, like someone I'd known long ago. I liked his curly hair. “That's awful. I'm so sorry, I must sound terrible complaining about my daughter.”

He watched me in the mirror behind the bar. “I finished a book about them today. I don't know what to do next.”

I felt almost embarrassed. My pain over Ace and Cassie and Mickey had me so worked up I'd forgotten that I still had them on some level or another. “Raising Cain or Raising Babies” might be an insult, but Cassie's voice was beautiful and Cassie was beautiful. I was proud of her.

“Listen,” I said to the guy, “you want to go somewhere quieter and have a drink?”

Light filled the room and I woke up alone—which, I admit, is something of a novelty. Loren claims I've never spent a night alone since my first marriage twenty-one years ago. He made a big deal out of it on our honeymoon. The charge isn't true. I've slept alone plenty times. Plenty might be stretching it, but often enough not to be afraid to.

Knowing Loren, I know that he must suspect fear of sleeping by myself was why I left the day before his Vision Quest began. I call crock on the idea. If that was the problem, I would have stayed home and found a warm body to heat the bed. Why drive three hundred miles in search of a crotch?

Did I scamper off to bed with the nearest cowboy while Loren roamed the countryside, chatting with the ghosts of Scott Fitzgerald and Flannery O'Connor? Of course not. I can sleep alone if I choose to. I simply don't normally choose to.

While we're on the subject, let's discuss these cross-country death and truth jaunts. For many women, the Fitzgerald trip to Maryland would have been just cause for a
Crack.
No one could have blamed me for walking away, but I didn't. I hung in there, all the way to the Vision Quest.

We'd only been married three months and I was still flying around in ecstasy. I was nuts about the guy. Loren was the first man who thought I knew how to take care of myself. He trusted me to make decisions. If I was depressed he didn't blame my period. We had our cabin in the aspen grove with the creek and my own room. We fucked and ate great meals and walked in the woods, alone or together. Loren and I had the three goals of every country song—money, time, and love.

Then one afternoon, he came crashing in the back door while I was domestically going through his jeans pockets before dumping them in the wash.

Loren said, “Scott Fitzgerald wants to tell me the end of
The Last Tycoon.”

I'm not illiterate. I know who Scott Fitzgerald is and before we were married, Loren told me about the writers' graves weirdness, but I was standing in the utility shed with my hands full of fuzzy candy and chewed-up straws. How was I supposed to make the connection that this guy Loren had to talk to was dead and buried in Maryland?

I threw him the keys. “Take the Toyota. It's gassed up.”

“Thanks.”

He was gone nine days. When he came home, I was so mad I didn't say a word about abandoning me in the wilderness.

“So how does
The Last Tycoon
end?”

“Scott wouldn't tell me, he changed his mind.”

That was the first sign I'd married an idiot. And do you think I got credit for sleeping alone those nine nights? Hell, no. Loren pretends he trusts me, but I know in his mind I was up on the mountain humping backpackers the whole time he was gone.

• • •

Sometime in the night Thorne left the couch, so even though I didn't go to sleep by myself, I woke up that way, which should count for at least half credit. More important than being alone, I woke up fully dressed in Janey Axel's spacious shirt and green army pants. The woman must have been built like a lumberjack.

I stretched and blinked and worked on focusing on the log ceiling. Ten hours of sober sleep had done wonders for my stressed-out attitude. No nausea, no headache. After a cup of coffee and a good toothbrushing I might feel human again.

The room was large and airy and decked out like a hunting lodge lobby—dead animal heads on the walls, a glass-fronted gun rack by the bay window, chairs and couches with bent sapling arms and legs and red upholstery grouped around a bear rug and a stone fireplace.

Through the window, a Wyoming blue sky stretched off north above the Red Desert. Loren was up there, the other side of the horizon. I wondered what he would eat for breakfast. Would he fix it himself or had he found a new caretaker—probably little Marcie VanHorn from down the road. Loren has a thing for young girls. His books are full of thirty-year-old men fulfilling wet dreams with seventeen-year-old cheerleaders in tight sweaters and short skirts. I'd wring his neck if I caught him fulfilling anything with the little tramp.

Of course, if everything had moved according to plan, Loren was up in the mountains, fasting and waiting for some detached voice to tell him where Buggie ended up. Buggie. I shook my head to clear the early morning half-sleep mind associations. Now wasn't the time to think about Buggie or Loren. Coffee came first.

• • •

Maria sat on the kitchen floor, polishing drawer handles. The handles were made from tips of deer antlers. I've never polished a drawer handle in my life, but then mine were always wooden knobs or metal swinging things and it didn't seem important. Only on a Wyoming ranch, or maybe a Montana bar, would drawer handles be made from an animal part.

My voice was a croak. “Coffee.”

“On the counter.” Maria held antler polish in one hand and a chamois rag in the other. Chewing gum, she concentrated on the smooth tip of the bottom drawer.

A full Mr. Coffee sat next to a Litton microwave that sat next to an Ashley wood stove that sat next to a Westinghouse gas range. The lineup shot to hell forever any theories of judging real folks from imposters by what they cooked on. The Mr. Coffee was spotless, shiny as a showroom jewel. All the other ovens and stoves, even the walls were equally blot free. I began to think I'd been wrong in liking Maria.

I found a cup and poured coffee. “Any idea the time?”

She glanced at a digital clock on the microwave next to me. “Seven-thirty.”

“What an awful time to be awake.” I sipped coffee while considering whether to stand and be uncomfortable or sit and risk a smudge.

“There's waffles in the oven and serviceberry syrup. I fried some bacon, but I got busy on the recipe files and it burnt up. I could make some more.” She started to rise.

“No, thanks anyway, Maria, but I'll stick with coffee for now, maybe try some waffles later. Is something wrong with your mouth?”

When Maria looked right at me, her pupils appeared to have been hardened into tiny rat pucks and sizzled in a frying pan. This wasn't the same serenity-personified woman I'd met yesterday. This woman was a wreck and I suddenly realized why.

“Do you hear a train?” Maria asked.

“Holy smoke, Maria, you've been dancing in the snowflakes.”

She looked down at her hands and gritted her teeth. “I found the Baggie in your jeans when I went to wash out the blood. I tried a little, then a little more. Forgive me, Mrs. Paul, I shouldn't have, but E.T. used to give me lines sometimes and I felt itchy, I guess. Then the cabinets looked dirty and when I hauled ashes from the wood stove I saw all this grease.” She clutched her hands together. “It was fun at first.”

I'm sorry, but I laughed—laughed so hard I spilled coffee on the shining floor. Maria'd buzzed her brains out and cleaned and snorted all night. On the one hand, her predicament was hilarious. I'd been in the position before. On the other hand, I felt so sorry for her because I'd been in the position before. It happened a couple of times while I was with Mickey and the band. Mickey was an alcohol and pills fanatic who generally regarded coke as a nasal form of herpes. But every now and then some bar owner or a roadie for a bigger band would offer up a pile, in seduction hopes, I suppose, and I'd come zipping back to the motel room about five in the morning, wide awake and ready to bust balls. Only Mickey and the boys would all be passed out like the drunks they were. I'd wind up reading heavy truths into the stock reports on all-night TV or making lists of the presents Ron and I bought the twins for Christmas and birthdays from the time they were two till twelve. It was awful. Some people enjoy the stuff. Many people must love it from what I read, but personally, I'd rather snort barbwire.

The memory made my throat tighten and my eyes ache. “I better get rid of that stuff.”

Maria sniffed. “Please.”

“Where is it?”

“I didn't know what to do so I hid the bag in the toaster oven.”

“Why would someone with a toaster and three ovens need a toaster oven?”

Maria shrugged. “Janey bought it.”

I set the Baggie on the kitchen table. We pulled up chairs and drank more coffee, discussing the situation. I explained how I came to own an ounce of cocaine, leaving out the part where Billy G called me a woman. Maria told me about when E.T. used to give her snorts. He was after her body, but she never gave in because she was afraid of Janey, and after a while E.T. stopped hitting on her. This led to a general rap on Janey's character, which led to Maria's father and her boyfriend, Petey, and the treatment of Spanish-Americans in the oil fields. I like to never got her to shut up.

“What can we do now?” I asked.

“Nothing, the oil fields are as bad as ever. Janey's as bad as ever. If it wasn't for Thorne I'd move to Nevada and work in a trailer.”

I couldn't picture Maria as a tiny hooker. Her posture was too good. “No, Maria, the bag. What can we do now with the bag?”

“You give it to the cowboys out in the bunkhouse. They're all a bunch of addicts anyway.”

“Do you want some more?”

Maria shuddered. “God, I hope not. Maybe you could sell it. Cocaine is worth a lot of money.”

“I don't know anything about selling drugs. Beside, that's kind of unethical, I think.”

“E.T. loves to sell drugs. I heard him in the game room an hour or so ago.”

“E.T.'s in the game room now?”

“He had the Grateful Dead turned up full volume.”

“Doesn't anyone around here ever sleep?”

Maria spoke through clenched jaws. “You should have seen Darlene about four o'clock this morning. She was out by the barn doing something odd with a prairie dog.”

I drained off the bottom of my coffee cup. “Whole Axel family's odd if you asked me.”

• • •

E.T.'s game room resembled any one of fifty basement bars I've seen in university towns. Obviously built for another purpose—wine cellar, fallout shelter, maybe a canned goods storeroom—these bars feature eight-foot ceilings, concrete walls, and pillars or dull-silver conduits rising from the dance floor. The fixtures hang about head level so direct light never quite reaches the corners, an effect which causes nose and cheekbone shadows straight from
Frankenstein Mauls Dracula's Daughter.

I suppose it's a flaw in my age group that I thought “game room” meant a pool table that can be converted to Ping-Pong, a refrigerator perhaps, and a card table for Risk or a never-completed jigsaw puzzle. Instead, at the base of the steps I found two long rows of blinking video games leading to a back wall piled high with more stereo equipment than a Muscle Shoals recording studio. Between the rows of Donkey Kong, Indoor Soccer, Radiation Ray, and Centipede lay a forty-foot boardwalk stacked with albums, cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes, and trash. Lots of trash, the kind of wrappers, bottles, bongs, peels, and used prophyls that a country band leaves the maid after a month-long gig in one hotel. I'd stumbled into the den of a renaissance derelict.

“Listen to this,” a voice said.

“Turn On Your Love Light” by the Grateful Dead boomed from the speaker bank, the sound bouncing from wall to wall like the Ping-Pong ball I'd been expecting.

“Turn it down,” I shouted.

The noise level dropped maybe twenty decibels. “What's the matter, don't like music?”

“The bass is killing the mix. Sounds like Lesh is on Dueling Cannons.”

E.T. appeared from an alcove I hadn't noticed between Frogger and Real Sports Football. “You know the Dead?”

He wore horn-rimmed glasses, which I hadn't expected. I don't know what I did expect. Thorne was large and, judging by her clothes, so was Janey. Darlene was fat and ugly. I guess I expected a big, ugly drug fiend. Put Woody Allen's head on Richard Benjamin's body and you'll have a rough picture of E.T. Axel. He wore cut-off Levi's and a yellow, sleeveless I LOST MY VIRGINITY AT THE '77 PROM T-shirt. He blinked at least four times between his question and my answer.

“Of course I know the Dead. Why don't you go by Eddie or Ed? E.T. sounds silly.”

E.T.'s posture was everything opposite Maria's. His forehead and hips led off with the shoulders hunched into a question mark position. “I had the name first. And, anyway, how'd you like to get stuck with a name like Ed? You're Dad's new woman, aren't you?”

“I'm nobody's woman, buster.”

E.T. turned to one of the video machines. “I didn't mean to offend. Everyone says you're here to replace Mother.”

“I guess I am, at least for a couple days.”

E.T. slid his glasses at me, then back at the screen. “You're a hell of a lot nicer-looking than Janey. Mind if I call you Mama?”

“God, yes, I mind.” I walked up and watched as E.T. pushed a button with his left hand and worked a lever with the right. I realized where E.T. got his posture. His spine was molded to the shape of a video game.

A burning building was pictured on the left side of the screen. A fireman threw a baby out the fourth-floor window to two other firemen on ground level with a net. When the baby hit the net, it bounced three floors back up and a little ways out from the building. At E.T.'s direction, the firemen scooted right and bounced the baby again. Meanwhile, however, the guy on the burning fourth floor heaved another baby out the window.

“That's gross,” I said.

“It's fun. Not everyone can juggle babies.”

The first baby reached ground floor on the right side of the screen where two stretcher-bearers caught the last bounce and shoved her, or him—the babies were asexual—into a waiting ambulance.

“What happens if you lose one?” I asked.

“Watch.” E.T. moved the firemen out from under a falling baby. A high-pitched scream lasted a half-second, ending suddenly with a
pop
and a sound like a hammer going through a ripe cantaloupe. A moment later, a white cross and two blue flowers appeared down-screen from the firemen.