Sorrow Floats (14 page)

Lloyd rubbed his leg. “I’m sure.”

“That leaves doping and nailing.”

Lloyd’s eyes went into their dubious wrinkle. “Shane doesn’t take dope.”

My head lurched an inch, then bounced back up, kind of aping Shane’s twitch. “Can a man in a catheter nail?”

“Maurey, you’re more obsessed with Shane’s sex life than he is.”

“What a disgusting thing to say.”

After Lloyd left the fuzz turned dense fog and lights coming out of the darkness. Time and space imploded. So to speak. As it were. I asked the bartender for a dry napkin and a pencil. I drew a map of the Pepi’s complex with an arrow going from the bar across the parking lot to Moby Dick, then I wrote, “Take my body to room five. I have friends there.”

I blinked awake to Andrew pointing a toy pistol at my face. “Bang, bang,” he said. His other hand clutched a single-scoop ice cream—chocolate—on a sugar cone.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to point guns at grown-ups?”

“The people with the treasure map wanted to shoot you, only the lady wouldn’t let them. But I did. I shot you good right between the eyes.”

Shot me good. “Little punk, I’ll show you what grown-ups shoot back with.” I felt around and found my windbreaker next to me on the sheet, but no Charley hidden in the pocket. He wasn’t on the narrow nightstand between the two beds, either. I hate it when I wake up without my gun.

Andrew crawled onto the bed and settled down next to my knees. “The man said you could be easy pickin’s. He smelled like throw-up.”

“Look, kid, I’m not responsible for your ice cream, you understand? You’ll lose it any second now, so don’t scream at me. It’s not my fault.” He nodded without looking at the cone. I went on. “Have you seen a .357 Magnum? The bore looks blue when you hold it in the light.”

I scooted to the edge to look under the bed—no Charley, but enough dust bunnies to start a hutch. When I lifted my head the room filled with yellow-and-black balloon-like scum. I realized I was naked with a six-year-old mini-Shane staring at whatever slipped from under the sheet.

Chocolate drips came across Andrew’s grubby little hand and soaked through the sheet over my thigh. “He told Mama you were ripe to bang-bang.”

“I was ripe for a gang-bang, Andrew. Not bang-bang.”

He shrugged, knowing the difference didn’t matter. The cone leaned at a fifty-degree angle or so, and I really wanted to be out of bed when it dropped. But Marcella wasn’t the type to ignore a floozie flashing her kid. I know those passive women. They turn tiger where their children are concerned. I could say “Close your eyes and I’ll give you a surprise” like Walt Walsowski did when he handed me his trout-penis, but Andrew was way too interested in staring at my weak cleavage to fall for the deal.

“Where’s your mother, Andrew?”

“She’s outside fighting with Daddy.”

“Your daddy?”

“Uncle Shane says my dad porks on the side. Do you know what pork means? It means he kisses girls with his mouth open. I saw him kiss Mrs. Gilliam like that. I was disgusted.”

“Will you look over by my suitcase for my pistol? I can’t get up without him.”

“When you kiss with your mouth open it makes you married. After that the daddy has to pull a plow.”

The chocolate fell off the cone onto my crotch area. I flipped the sheet—ice cream, windbreaker, and all—over Andrew’s head, then made a dash for the John. His howl barely started when I slammed the door.

***

Desperate people often mark time in days and nights. “If I can make it through one more day/night, I’ll be okay.” Which is a lie, of course. Desperate people are never okay. In the last few days I’d developed a similar system of marking time using showers. “I’ll be fine if I can just get a shower.” Or, “I remember talking to Pud. It was between the first shower at Lydia’s and the second.” Time had transcended the sun.

The shower in Amarillo was pretty good, as far as showers go. I ran out of hot water with a head full of soap, and Pepi should call the Culligan man for a softener, but on the whole I was satisfied.

Sam Callahan says women mark time by meals, but he’s usually wrong. He wrote a short story where all the women in the world were divided between those who stopped eating under stress and those who ate like pigs under stress. The men built a tall wall between the two groups with guard towers every hundred yards with machine-gun nests. Only the women who stopped eating under stress were allowed to have babies, so within three generations obesity was bred out of the human species. The only problem was the men had to keep the women under stress at all times. Sam said his story was set in the past.

After my shower I dressed in clean stuff, searched the room high and low, and went out into the absorbent Texas sunlight to watch Marcella and Hugo Sr. fight.

They’d reached that point where you’ve run through all the loud accusations and rebuttals at least twice and you’ve fallen into tense silences. Time out for rearmament. Marcella and Hugo Sr. both held ends of the bowling bag strap, as if they’d given up on a tug-of-war. Marcella stared at the white gravel next to the horse trailer while Hugo Sr. blinked at her through rectangular eyeglasses. He was rectangular in many ways—bread box-shaped head, squared-off shoulders, square-cut boots with loop buckles like the dope dealers wore back in college. Only Hugo sure didn’t look like a dope dealer, he looked like a rectangular man who took mug shots of grade school children.

Marcella held Hugo Jr. on the arm that didn’t hold the bowling bag. Andrew knelt by an eighteen-wheel Otasco semitruck, letting air out of a tire with a wooden matchstick. His parents were too busy being tense to notice.

“The driver’s liable to yank off your arm and beat you with the stub,” I said to Andrew. That was Dad’s favorite threat. I was eight years old before I realized he couldn’t actually do it.

Andrew looked up at me. “I saw you naked.”

“Call the police.”

“You have freckles on your butt.”

Which was a lie if I ever heard one. Lloyd’s sandals stuck out of Moby Dick’s hood as if the ambulance had eaten him alive and was just sucking up the last morsel. With the hood up, M.D. looked more like a pelican than a whale. When you’re comparing things to animals I guess size is irrelevant.

His head popped out and looked down at me. “The map to your room trick was a good idea. When I passed out in bars they used to roll me out by the trash.”

“I’ve used it before.”

“One of the waitresses spotted it or you’d’ve been roughneck mincemeat. Those oil field guys don’t care if their dates are awake.”

I looked into the engine. Lloyd was tightening something to something. I’m not real mechanical for a ranch girl. “Where’d you and Shane sleep?”

Lloyd stuck a socket wrench on a knobby thing. “I spread my bag in Moby Dick, same as I always do. Figured since you paid for the room you ought to have a bed. Marcella and the kids took the other one.”

When had I paid for the room? Behind me, Marcella said, “What’s Annette Gilliam got I don’t?”

Hugo Sr. said, “She thinks I’m interesting.”

“The tulip behind her ear is cotton, Hugo. Didn’t you realize that?” When I turned to look they’d switched with his head down and her staring at him. The motel was on the edge of Amarillo—I wasn’t about to pass a bar yesterday—so across the road the fields stretched out flat and black. The sky wasn’t even the same color as home; it was a bleached-out blue like the eyes of a malamute.

“Why would people live in this godforsaken land?” I asked.

Hugo Sr. glared at me like I was being snippy. “I live here,” he said. Marcella dropped her end of the bag and turned around to cry. I could see she was crying; Hugo Sr. couldn’t. For all he knew she was admiring the view.

“Water pump was forty-five dollars,” Lloyd said. “Receipt’s in your basket. Shane didn’t make it in.”

“I hope he didn’t spend the night outside,” Marcella said. “He knows in his condition he’s prone to pneumonia and death.”

Every conversation I had with Lloyd seemed like two unconnected conversations spliced together. “What were you doing in Dad’s creel?”

He looked up from his hands. “You threw it at me, remember? You said take what money I needed and you sprinted off to the lounge.”

“I don’t think I sprinted.”

Marcella turned to me with tears tracking down her cheeks. “You sprinted. We all agreed that was the word.”

Hugo Sr. let the bag drop. He said, “If you leave, I will follow to the end of the Earth. My baby shall never cry without his father hearing and coming to his aid.”

Andrew crawled under the truck with another matchstick. His voice came from behind the inside dual. “I saw you pork Mrs. Gilliam.”

***

My body speaks its needs in one-word sentences. “Shower,” it says. “Whiskey.” “Sleep.” Right then it said “Coffee.” Whenever I need something I need it right now and I need it real bad.

I sat in the Golden Sandstorm Cafe in a window booth, listening to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” on the dishroom radio. Some joker leaves prison and the whole darn bus cheers when his girlfriend takes him back. Had to rank with “Cotton Eye Joe” as the worst songs in world history. I’m not a snob or anything, but bad taste offends me.

Here’s what I thought about over coffee as I looked out the window at trucks kicking up dust on U.S. 287: I thought about the ever-closing gap between the time I first feel the urge for something and the absolute last moment I can go without it without screaming. My body needs were becoming Nazis of immediate gratification.

Except in the one area where gratification used to count most. It’d been many months, maybe even years, since my body said “Sex.” Had I lost the need, let it slip into wistful-stuff-from-my-youth, or had it merely gone into hibernation, someday to awaken with a hungry roar to devour whatever object with a penis happened to be standing nearby?

Sometimes I hoped it was lost forever, other times I hoped to roar again. More starve-or-binge mentality. For someone who didn’t want sex I sure thought about it a lot.

***

“Stand by for news!”

All right
. I hadn’t known what time it was or what station carried Paul’s show or anything, and here he was. My lucky day. Of course, Amarillo might be the one town with Paul on every station, but you take your omens of an upswing wherever you find them.

Paul’s voice, or God’s, or Dad’s, depending on your suspension of disbelief, came echoing across America’s heartland with the Truth. All the Truth, nothing but the Truth, so help us God.

I wasn’t sure, didn’t even care, about Truth’s content—Paul was against hijacking, obscenity in schools in Illinois, and the nation of Argentina, for the workingman and Kerr canning jars, and split on Watergate. I think he took the everybody-does-it-so-get-off-Nixon’s-back stance. Or maybe he condemned the stance, the dish machine made it hard to follow. Paul had a funny line about Chuck Colson’s grandmother.

Content didn’t matter. What mattered was one person in the whole universe who was sure of something. Paul Harvey gave my life consistency. Like showers and Yukon Jack, he was there when all else broke up and floated away. When Paul read the daily bumper snicker—“Have Grandchild, Will Baby-sit”—I almost wanted to cry. Cliff and Marjene Henderson were celebrating seventy-five years of wedded bliss. Take that, Dothan Talbot. A street woman in Little Rock had searched thirty years for the son she gave up as a baby, then was arrested for vagrancy and when she went up before the judge, glory be, there he was. The woman is now living comfortably in the judge’s guest room, cared for by her doting baby boy.

Only in America. How many mothers gave up their sons before one of them made it as a story on Paul Harvey News?

Marcella did her timid entry thing with Hugo Jr. through the screen door. After Paul, and the reunited family story, I actually didn’t mind her joining me. When Marcella ordered breakfast, I said, “I’ll take whatever she’s having.”

***

What she was having was skimmed milk, Texas toast, and hash browns. Texas toast is when you take a loaf of white bread and drop it in the French fryer.

“Shane tells me your marriage failed also,” Marcella said. Her bun leaked strands of black hair across her high cheekbones, and she hadn’t fixed her face after the tear session. Hugo Jr. drooled on her shoulder on this smock thing that covered her chain-store blouse. Gave her a
Grapes of Wrath
look.

“Yes, my marriage failed also.”

“Did your husband commit adultery?”

“Dothan nailed anything that didn’t fight back.”

Her hands reminded me of a lawn full of grasshoppers in late summer. On first glance you think
Peaceful lawn
, but give it a second look and you realize peaceful is actually chaos.

Marcella’s face was void of a sense of humor. “Hugo Sr. is adulterous.”

“Throw his ass into the street.”

We both paused over our fried bread to picture Marcella throwing anybody’s ass anywhere. She adjusted the collar of her smock. “Is that how you treated your husband when he was”—pause—“with another?”

I thought about Dothan and Sugar and whose ass wound up in the street. “That’s what I would do, not what I did. What I did was drink whiskey until I didn’t care anymore.”

She stared into her milk the way I did coffee or alcohol. I don’t see how you can fathom deep stuff in milk because the surface doesn’t let in light.

“I’m tempted to drink whiskey, I really am.” Her eyes lifted to mine. “Only I don’t think I could ever drink enough not to care that Hugo was intimate with Annette Gilliam. I’ll never be able to look at him again without seeing her kissing his lips. They even did it in the Oldsmobile once. Can you imagine doing it in a car—like an animal.”

The tendency was to belittle—“What animal does it in a car, Marcella?”—but I squashed that tendency. The woman left her husband because he nailed on the side. Timid flower or not, she had more courage than I did.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “Whenever I close my eyes I see them in the public schools taking memory photos of the little children, then they go out in the parking lot and she touches him in the Oldsmobile, and he says, ‘I love you, Annette Gilliam.’ How could he do that, then come home and kiss our babies and touch me with the same hands that touched her?”

I gave my explanation. “Men are scum.”

Marcella’s eyes were all need. “My life is a nightmare.”

I’m no good at eye contact with women. I always think they can see what I’m hiding. I don’t know what I’m hiding, I never looked at it myself, but it’s dirty and weak and I can hide it from men but not from women.

I pulled away from her eyes to look out the window at Andrew, who seemed to be peeing into a Cadillac’s gas tank. “When I came back to GroVont from college, I decided I’d been hurt as much as I could stand. I married Dothan because I thought nothing he did would ever hurt me.”