Western Swing (35 page)

Afterwards, he leaned forward and almost kissed me, but didn't. “So, you want to get married?” Thorne asked.

“No.”

He seemed to accept my answer. He didn't push it anyway. Much later he leaned me back on the bed and we made love. I don't think Thorne had been with many women other than Janey.

There's something touching about being with a man who's somewhat clumsy in bed. It's as if he's going on desire and emotion rather than technical experience. Makes me feel more appreciated, less like a judge at a gymnastics meet. It's not something I'd want to do every day, of course, but the lack of fire is made up for by how good I feel about myself afterwards. It's like the glow I used to feel on Christmas morning with Connie and Cassie. Or that dizziness after I donate to a Red Cross blood drive.

Later, Thorne slept with his head between my breasts. I lay there awhile, staring at the ceiling, thinking, and wishing for a cigarette.

• • •

I awoke to confusion—shouts outside, doors slamming, orange light on the window, feet running in the hall. Gritz's mustache appeared above the bed.

“Barn's on fire, boss.” He didn't say it with any more urgency than “Time for breakfast” or “Rain coming.” By the time I realized what he meant, Gritz was gone and Thorne was pulling on his jeans. I ran to the window. Flames licked from the hayloft. Slivers of fire crept up the eaves. Men ran in and out the loading doors, saving machinery, tools, and tack. A guy pulled on Laredo's reins as the horse fought to go back in.

“Holy Christ,” I said, but Thorne was already out the door.

I threw on Janey's clothes and E.T.'s sneakers. As I ran down the hall, I have to admit my first thought was how glad I was that the fire wasn't in the house. I flashed a vivid picture of myself running naked from the burning building into E.T.'s waiting arms. Even the mental picture was horrifying.

The front yard wasn't nearly as chaotic as I'd expected. There was a lot of noise and rushing, but everyone seemed to be doing his job. Five or six cowboys were hauling out the last of what could be saved. Another five or six worked with hoses down by the windmill. The hoses were obviously worthless. The barn's entire roof was burning. The fire made a sound like rushing air. I could hear the loft breaking up, falling into the main floor.

Thorne and Gritz stood about halfway between the house and the barn. I don't think either one was aware of my presence.

“Get those men out of there,” Thorne shouted. “Anything inside now is gone.”

Gritz shielded his face with a raised arm. “Laredo was the only horse in the stalls and we saved him. This'll cook the chickens.”

“How much hay?”

“Not much—fifteen, twenty ton. I sure hate to lose that saddle.”

“I hate to lose that barn.”

I don't know which one screamed. I heard a sound and turned to see E.T. dragging Darlene through the loading-bay doors. He had her around the middle, half dragging, half carrying, while she thrashed her arms and legs, a child in a temper tantrum. They were almost out when she bent over and bit one of his hands. He jerked. She broke free. She ran a couple of steps back into the fire, fell, and he caught her again. By then, Thorne and another cowboy were there to help.

They dragged her away from the fire, Darlene screaming and crying the whole way. Her face was black from the smoke or soot. Her shirt tore off, leaving her in a bra white as the exposed skin.

All the cocaine added to the adrenaline fear-rush must have blown E.T.'s circuits because he floated along behind the scene looking practically calm. Serene maybe, like a shock therapy patient. He drifted over and said, “Hey,” seemingly oblivious to the fire at his back and Darlene's hysterics.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“My Dead tapes are safe.”

Darlene calmed down enough to blame Thorne for the fire. “This is your fault, you started this.”

Thorne held both her wrists. He looked into Darlene's fierce eyes. “Your mother and I built that barn before you were born. Why would I burn it?”

“Because you hate yourself.”

An explosion blew a wall of hot air out the front of the barn, knocking two cowboys off their feet. I saw Billy G get up still clutching the hose. I hadn't destroyed his life after all.

“What was that?” Thorne shouted over the roar.

“Fifteen gallons of gasoline,” E.T. said. We all turned on him. “She bought thirty gallons, but left fifteen in a tank by the back door.”

“Where'd she get the money to buy that much gas?” Thorne asked.

Darlene jumped at me and shrieked. Then she whirled back at Thorne. “Got you, got you,” she laughed, “I bet you don't bring whores home while Mama's away now, Daddy dear.”

Thorne slapped her. She fell into the dirt and stared up at him, her black face reflecting the firelight. E.T. screamed,
“You son of a bitch,”
and jumped on Thorne's back. Thorne spun around, clawing at E.T. until he worked him up on one shoulder. Then he lifted E.T. and threw him across the yard and onto Darlene. Out of breath, Thorne pointed at them. “You two are off the ranch. You're out of my life. It's suicide or throwing you out and I'm throwing you out.”

Darlene pulled the hair out of her eyes. Tears ran clear, scar-like streaks through the black of her face. She pulled herself up on her hands and knees and hissed, “Mama knows everything you do.”

Back in the crowd of onlookers, I thought of my daughters and Buggie, my parents, Loren's mother. You can't stop loving someone just because they're a disappointment. Loren needed me. I needed him.

I said,
“Crack.”

No one heard except Gritz. His mustache turned until he was looking at me from one eye. He said, “Good riddance.”

“Didn't know you cared, Gritz.”

He spit and moved away to help Billy G and the others with the hoses. In the flickering, flashing light of the burning barn, I turned and walked to the Toyota. E.T. never would recover his sneakers.

On the fourth day, it rained. Not an exciting summer thunder-head rain like the storms that used to rip across the city in Houston. This rain was more in the line of a cold mountain drizzle. I woke up completely out of the spiritual enlightenment mood. Maybe it was the dream about Buggie and Ann, or maybe I missed Lana Sue. Maybe I was just hungry. Whatever the cause, all my religious fervor pissed out across the wet ground.

What I really wanted was a hot bath, two giant towels, a steak and eggs breakfast, and to hold Lana Sue for an hour or so. Then I wanted to make love—oral first, then vaginal—and drink three cups of coffee with real cream. Nothing even vaguely connected to a day of Fig Newtons, drizzle, and climbing a mountain.

I hung the daypack in a low Doug fir and draped my wet sleeping bag around the branches. It was fiberfill instead of goose down, so I figured to be somewhat warm the next night, even if I had to sleep damp.

The bag formed a sort of canopy over one spot of almost dry earth. My legs had to stay out in the rain, but I made the rest of myself as comfortable as possible, considering. Five or six Fig Newtons later, I flipped open the Spell-Write notebook and wrote,
I now understand why most world religions sprung from the desert climate.
I chewed another Newton and watched rain drip off a big whitebark across the ledge. The mist was so fine that the tree seemed to be gathering moisture from the air and manufacturing raindrops.

The whitebark made me think of God, which made me think of Buggie. Where was my son? Even if I could narrow it down to dead or alive, that would be something. Not knowing anything was a pain in the butt which, as time passed, was taking all the kick out of my new life with Lana Sue.

Here I was with a perfect wife, big bucks, a cabin in the woods within the sound of running water, all the time I needed to write or love or do whatever I felt like doing—my life's goals accomplished and it wasn't worth stale crap because my brain was stuck in one agonizing rut.
Where the fuck was my kid?

I skipped three lines and wrote,
Ignorance of an answer is worse than the worst of all possible answers.

I mean, I knew where Ann was. Or at least I knew where Ann's body was. She'd brought a husband's worst nightmare to reality. My wife killed herself. Try facing that fact one day at a time.

However, over the last four years, I'd been forced to pay the bills, brush my teeth, tie my shoes, change the oil in the car. I'd taken hundreds of walks in the woods. I'd earned Lana Sue's understanding. Somehow I'd worked out a way of dealing with Ann's death—I'd come to a sort of quiet, sad acceptance. But there was no way of accepting Buggie's fate, no way to deal with it and let go.

So, I worked out my cockamamie theory that God could be finagled into coughing up a few answers. Cheyennes did it. Jesus did it. Confucius, Max Brand. If all those people could weird themselves into visions of truth, so could I. And God owed me more than a simple dead or alive. If Buggie was dead, I wanted some real whereabouts information. No more hocus-pocus; religion is an extensive wine list, pick your vintage and pop the cork. I demanded truth.

Lana Sue let me run with the obsession until I started talking to Buggie and God instead of her. Now she was gone and the purpose of the search was suddenly fuzzy. The entire process had one final goal: freedom to live wholeheartedly with Lana Sue. But to reach that goal, I'd lost her. I was working backwards.

The thing to do was to run to the top of the mountain, get this religious catharsis jive over with, and go find my wife. My live wife. The wife who made me happy and life worth the mess.

I spoke to the dripping whitebark. “God better be there when I make the top of the hill because I'm not hanging around until He shows up.”

The whitebark just dripped. I wasn't crazy enough yet to hear talking trees. Maybe at the top.

With that, I shrugged on my daypack, then pulled my sleeping bag around my head, shoulders, and back, and trotted off into the wet forest—must have looked like a jogging hunchback in a nylon shawl.

• • •

After Ann's suicide, I decided that any artificial mind diversion was a cheat and had to go, so I stopped drinking alcohol and watching television. Life suddenly got real. Each morning I woke up on the couch, terrified. I ate a bowl of Corn Chex and half a grapefruit. Then I sat at the kitchen table and worked on
Disappearance
for eight hours. What had been the facing of one loss became the avoidance of another.

After I finished my day's work, I fixed a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and popped open a Dr Pepper. I sat on the couch to eat and didn't get back up until the next day. I could sleep for short periods on the couch in my clothes. Any attempt at the bed or undressing brought on vivid images of Ann in her coffin, then Ann rotting under the ground. I saw her face decompose. The hollows under her cheekbones went first, then the indentations on her temples. Her neck turned stringy. Her eyes opened. I woke up terrified.

This went on about three months. The landlady dropped by for the rent, which I couldn't pay. She knew the circumstances, however, and didn't have the heart to throw me into the street. Once she brought a casserole dish of mulligan stew, but I couldn't eat meat yet. I set the dish out the back door for the neighborhood dogs.

I remember doing a hundred push-ups one night. It took a couple of hours. Another time, Ann's boss from the day care came over. I pretended she was with the KGB and I was being questioned for thoughts against the state. I found a dead daddy longlegs and buried her in one of Ann's hanging plant pots. The plant had dried up the summer Buggie left, so I figured I'd get some use from the dirt.

The police called and made me drive downtown to see another dead little boy. It wasn't Buggie.

I came to hitchhiking in Nevada. The driver was an old lady wearing white gloves and a box hat with a net over her face. She asked why I wanted to see Max Brand's grave. She said she couldn't stand graveyards, hadn't been in one since Mr. Dodd died.

“Who's Mr. Dodd?” I asked.

“He was my husband.”

I wandered the San Joaquin Valley for several days before a cub reporter on some newspaper told me Max Brand was really Frederick Faust, who was buried in Italy. After that, I wound up in jail in Hannibal, Missouri, on a drunk and disorderly charge. Mark Twain isn't buried in his hometown either.

I spent three days in jail—with some very strange people—before a deputy decided I couldn't still be drunk. A psychiatrist was called in and the final upshot was my brother, Patrick, flew up from Texas and took me back to Denver.

By then, Patrick had gone big in Alcoholics Anonymous. It was his life and religion. I think he spent as much time on AA as he used to on alcohol, but at least he got more done and he was easier to be around. He also had more money. Draining swamps for real estate had been lucrative since he sobered up. Patrick paid my back rent and a couple of months to spare. He took me to Kroger's and bought a shopping cart full of frozen dinners and organic vitamins.

As I drove him out to Stapleton International, Patrick told me to straighten up and join AA, even though I wasn't necessarily a drunk.

“AA is like having a real family,” he said. “Haven't you ever wanted a real family?”

“You bet.”

Patrick flew away, I went home and back to
Disappearance.

• • •

In late June I hooked back up with the brick cleaning company. I enjoy cleaning bricks. It's outdoors, physical, yet not too heavy. The hammering is controlled, almost gentle. You can't just go crazy and start smashing mortar. Even then, I wasn't into smashing.

After cleaning bricks all day, I wrote in the evenings and on weekends. Nights, I drank beer and watched television. I found a midnight-to-dawn radio talk show that was hosted by a woman whose voice was soothing. Her name was Kathy, like my sister's. Only cranks and lonely people telephoned her, so I turned the sound off whenever a call came in, then I turned it back up in time to hear Kathy's voice again. Real late at night, right before sleep, I downed four measured ounces of Jim Beam and three aspirins—not a bad combination.

I'd had to start
Disappearance
all over after Ann used the manuscript to light the baby-bed fire. The book was probably better for it. The first three-fourths were about Buggie and the last part dealt with how we were treated and what it felt like after he left. I wrote a lot about guilt, anxiety, and loss.

One night it was too hot to sit in the duplex watching
Odd Couple
reruns, so I climbed into the Chevelle and circled Denver for a few hours. I drifted all over the city, cruising the franchise strips, watching people in the other cars. At a Big Boy on State Street I met a girl who claimed to be a prostitute. I'm not certain how it happened, or if I drove down there looking for a hooker or what. She certainly didn't try to entrap me. She hardly spoke a sentence.

“Twenty dollars,” she said.

“Are you really a hooker?”

“Do I look like a Girl Scout?”

She looked like someone's teenage daughter was what she looked like. A baby-sitter maybe, the kind that drinks giant forty-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola and chews gum while she talks on your phone. She was dark, with pretty eyes and a tiny overbite. Long silver earrings dangled from both ears, but the right ear had a second fake diamond post up in the cartilage.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Teresa, listen, I need a yes or a no here.”

“How old are you?”

“You want my life history or you want to get laid?”

She was young and vulnerable and I was old and couldn't afford her. However, I hadn't been laid in just over three years. Abstinence that long changes a person's standards.

“I'll do it if you'll wash off some makeup,” I said.

“That'll cost extra.”

She took me to a hotel room straight out of a bad French movie about artists and heroin addicts. The place was almost too bare to be filthy. I'd have run away if the naked light bulb had been more than forty watts.

“Do you live here, Teresa?”

“You want straight, oral, or half and half?”

When we came to the actual act, I failed. As I fingered Teresa's little nipple, I remembered the last time I'd had sex, the day Buggie disappeared. That was the last time before she died that Ann and I talked as friends and lovers, the last time she trusted me.

“I'm sorry,” I told Teresa.

“Happens all the time.”

I paid her ten dollars an hour to lie next to me and hold me while I slept. The next morning, I awoke with an erection and finished the job.

Every couple of weeks the rest of the summer and early fall, I drove down to State Street and found Teresa. I looked at it as letting the air out of my tires before the pressure mounted and I blew a tube. She looked at it as business. Even though she hardly ever spoke more than five words, I suppose I would have eventually gotten involved in Teresa's personal life. I generally do when I sleep with a woman.

However, sometime in October she disappeared. I hung around eating pie in the Big Boy for three nights straight, but Teresa didn't show. No one answered when I knocked at her room. I tried asking the more obvious hookers on the street if they'd seen her. A couple knew who I was talking about, but no one seemed to know where she'd gone. The women offered to do the task for her, but my heart wasn't in it. I'd grown fond of Teresa. I didn't feel like trying another whore.

Eventually I wandered home and went back to letting the air out of my tires the old way, by hand.

• • •

I finished
Disappearance
on a Saturday afternoon in November. The last scene took place in the same graveyard that holds Peter Pym and Mary Louise Wolfe. A backhoe rests behind a canvas canopy. Seven or eight day-care teachers and moms watch as Ann is lowered into the ground. I stare off through the falling snow.

The scene was sad and emotional to write, but to tell the truth, after dwelling on one subject for over a year and then typing four hundred pages on that subject, I was burnt. Anyone who has ever lived day and night for a goal, then reached that goal, knows what I mean about the post-finish depression.

I skipped two lines and typed THE END. My fingers on the keyboard were a strange greenish-yellow color. The keyboard itself was dusty. A dirty thumbprint showed on the space bar. Why hadn't I seen those things before? I hit the line return a couple more times, then typed WHAT NEXT?

There were me and my ghosts and my manuscript—too many entities for one small duplex. Someone had to leave right away and I had a horrible feeling that if it wasn't me it would be the manuscript. Five more minutes alone in a room with that book and I would have burned it again. By the time I reached the Chevelle, air came in short gasps. I felt like a family fleeing poltergeists.

I drove all the way to Boulder and back before I could catch my breath enough to think in a straight line. There was a yearning of some kind. I wanted to be near someone I knew. I circled State, searching for Teresa, then I drove up to Denver University just in case some old English professor might be wandering through the parking lot. I got to thinking about Ann. She would have been proud that I finished a book. She always had more faith in my writing than I did. At least until Buggie disappeared.

I cruised the apartment complex where we lived when we met. A light was on in her place. A cardboard skeleton left over from Halloween hung in the window.

One year on my birthday, Ann found a baby-sitter and took me to a gigantic restaurant out by the Interstate named Los Gatos. That would be the place to stop and drink the yearning into nostalgia. Ann had been happy the night of my birthday. Maybe I'd feel close to her there, close to the real Ann that I met, not the dazed Ann that I lost.