Sorrow Floats (15 page)

“If he can’t hurt you, you don’t love him.”

“That’s the point, Marcella.”

She stared at me. I know her background. She was raised to believe marriage for any reason other than love, even if the reason is to avoid pain, is the worst sin a woman can commit.

“Was it true?” she asked. “Has he ever hurt you?”

Andrew finished peeing and began stuffing gravel into the gas tank. I could see Hugo Sr. sitting in his Oldsmobile in front of the Zippy Mart next door. He was drinking something from a thermos. I thought about Dothan and the Wyoming Family Violence Protection Act that took my baby and gave it to him.

“No,” I said. “He hasn’t found a way to hurt me.”

***

“There’s Shane,” I said. The wheelchair came around the west corner of the fake adobe motel. Far as I could tell, nothing existed beyond that corner but black dirt.

Marcella slid from the booth and stood up with Hugo Jr. on her hip. “I hope he didn’t spend the night outdoors. My brother is prone to pneumonia and death.” Shane didn’t look prone to death. He was playing his harmonica and bobbing his head as a little girl in a costume pushed the chair.

“The doctors told him to get rest and never catch a cold.”

“Why should Shane be more prone to pneumonia than you or me?” I asked.

“It’s his disease.” Marcella fished in her vinyl purse and came out with a couple of crumpled dollar bills. At least someone else had money on this trip. “He has baseball disease. He’ll die of it for sure someday, but most people with baseball disease catch pneumonia and die before the other stuff gets them.”

I did some extensive two-plus-two work. “You mean Lou Gehrig’s disease?”

“One of those players. I always forget which one.” She leaned forward and squinched her eyes up to peer out the window. “Who’s that with him?”

The little girl in costume wasn’t a little girl at all, at least not in the sense most people give
little girl
, which is
young girl
.

“You think it’s a blond Indian?” Marcella asked as we crossed the gravel lot between the cafe and motel.

“More like a surfer chick,” I said, having never seen a surfer chick except on TV. The girl was blond, but not wheat blond, more legal-pad yellow, and she had a tan the color of granola. Her bangs were long and thick as the hair on the back of her head—the bowl look. She wore wire-rim glasses, a red rag bikini top, and an ankle-length skirt made from a tapestry. With every step she bounced on her toes, as if she had more energy than her body could handle. Between her head-bobs and Shane’s they looked like a pair of toys you’d set in the back window of your car.

When Marcella and I came within earshot, Lloyd was rubbing his leg like crazy. His voice carried a pitch high. “Does she have drugs on her? We can’t transport no drugs.”

Shane took the girl’s hand off his shoulder and kissed her knuckles. I don’t know if he’d scored or what, but he sure wanted us to think so. His flabby face was all atwitch with winks, grins, and eyebrow arches. “Certainly she has no drugs. Critter is into pure nature highs. You aren’t transporting any illegal drugs are you, Critter?”

“Heck no, I promise.” The girl with the god-awful name did a cross-my-heart-hope-to-die thing with her right hand. “I did them all up in Tucumcari. We fixed psychedelic mushroom spaghetti with ground hash meatballs. Was a bit chewy, but boy, did it fuck your head. I was in Tucumcari for a Captain Beefheart concert.” She leaned her face toward Marcella. “Are you into Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band?”

Marcella didn’t nod yes or shake no or anything, just looked at Critter like you look at a snake in a zoo. Even Andrew came over to give her his openmouthed attention.

“Captain Beefheart is my role model,” Critter said. “Everything he does is meaningful on the third level. Have you ever listened really close to ‘Frying Pan’?”

She put her palms atop Shane’s head and lifted her eyes to the Texas sky.
“Go downtown, you walk around, a man comes up, says he’s gonna put you down. You try to succeed to fulfill your need, then a car hits you and people watch you bleed.”
She bent to kiss Shane’s forehead. “Think about it,” she said.

Shane pumped up proud enough to have an aneurysm. Both his shoes were untied, and his shirt was buttoned wrong. I didn’t put much stock in that. Shane’s the kind of guy would button his shirt wrong on purpose to call attention to the fact he’d recently been disrobed.

He bent his head straight back and looked up at her chin and said, “I understand.”

Critter raised on her toes and swiveled to me. “You’re the alcoholic, aren’t you? It’s not your fault, at least not the fault of the you you are now. Addiction is the spirit’s way of working out karma from another life.”

I blinked twice and decided she wasn’t real. “We about ready to pull out?” I asked Lloyd.

He aimed his Jesus eyes at the gravel, which gave me a funny feeling. Bad news was on the way. Lloyd said, “Shane offered Critter a ride to Oklahoma. We’re going that way.”

Her voice was an Okie accent mixed with fried brains, if that’s not a redundancy. “I really appreciate it, man. The chick Glenda I hitched out with split with one of Beefheart’s roadies to homestead in Canada. Land is free there. The guy knows a place that sells Jeeps packed in grease all the way from World War Two for fifty-five dollars. Wrap your mind around that. Homesteading in Canada would be such a trip. The guy has wolves in his yard and everything.”

I broke in. “Wrap your mind around fat chance. Lloyd, what’s she, sixteen, seventeen tops?”

“Eighteen,” Shane said.

“That’s runaway, not to mention statutory if Bozo here got his dipstick wet.”

Shane winked. “I’ll never tell.” Critter kissed his greasy head again.

I plowed on. “We’ve got a hundred cases of illegal Coors in the trailer. We can’t turn Moby Dick into a teenie-bopper bus line.”

Critter touched me. I couldn’t believe the nerve. She reached across Shane and touched my arm. “You’re carrying some incredibly heavy medicine on your second level. I have a massage technique that may ease your pain.”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

Shane leaned back so his ear brushed her red bikini top. “The beer isn’t illegal until we cross the Arkansas line. Besides, little missy, it’s not your say, you are simply along for the ride. Moby Dick belongs to my good friend Lloyd.”

“I’m buying the gas, I say she stays.”

Shane took a stand. “If Critter stays, I stay.”

We—me, Marcella, Shane, Critter, even little Andrew—looked to Lloyd. He made an unlikely leader, with his Adam’s apple and stringy arms, but we made an unlikely gang of followers. He gazed off across the Panhandle awhile, then nodded once and looked back at me. I knew I’d lost the power play. People forced to choose always first look at the person they’re about to disappoint.

He said, “Shane’s stuck with me for three years. He stood by me through detox. I can’t leave him behind.”

Shane’s whole face went gloat.

Critter said, “Far out, man, I’m into loyalty.”

***

Dear Dad,

This picture is either a cowboy riding a very large rabbit or a rabbit under a very small cowboy. Proportion in Texas is shot to hell. The state is like Wyoming, only flat and the sky and earth are the wrong color. Makes for disorientation.

I am living in an ugly cartoon.

Wish you weren’t dead,

Maurey

***

Critter scampered back into the fields to fetch her duffel bag, and I walked over to Zippy Mart to drop my postcard in a mailbox. On the way back Hugo rolled down his window and motioned me over.

“Where are you taking her?” he asked.

I lied. “Mexico. We’re going to Mexico first, then maybe Costa Rica.”

He said, “I’ll never stop following her.”

I leaned one hand on the door handle. “If you want her so much and can’t live without her, why nail Annette Gilliam?”

He rolled the window shut.

Back at the motel Shane was circling the rig, organizing the transfer of Marcella’s suitcase, several spare tires, Sam Callahan’s tent, and a couple of engine parts I couldn’t identify from M.D. to the horse trailer. Whenever I tried to talk to him he pretended something urgent had come up and he took off, arms pumping.

I discovered a really neat way to get the attention of a man in a wheelchair. You take a tire tool and stick it between his spokes.

“What?” Shane demanded.

“Where’s Charley?”

“I loathe a woman who talks in riddles.”

“My Dan Wesson model 12 .357 Magnum with a four-inch barrel, which is longer than yours, by the way. I want him back.”

Shane sputtered and twitched. I never met a man yet couldn’t be put at a disadvantage by making sport of his dick size.

“I don’t have your precious pistol,” Shane said. “You probably got drunk and lost it.”

“That’s impossible. I would never lose Charley.”

“You got drunk and lost your baby, why couldn’t you get drunk and lose your gun?”

***

Andrew had to use the bathroom twice between the time we loaded him into Moby Dick and we left the motel. Right then I could foretell the next 1,500 miles. For some reason, Marcella handed Hugo Jr. to Shane. Hugo Jr. reacted by going into high wail. The kid wouldn’t shut up, not even when Shane gave him back. First thing Critter did in Moby Dick was light incense—smelled like Dothan’s hands during his taxidermy period. The kitten peed on a sleeping bag.

Lloyd asked me to drive the first shift. “I have something for you,” he said. He leaned in the passenger door and opened the glove compartment to show me a half-pint of Yukon Jack. “When you need it, tell me and I’ll take over the driving.”

“Isn’t there a rule against you AA guys buying booze for other people?”

“No.” He pulled himself up into the seat. “You will stop drinking when you decide to stop. I see no reason for us to repeat yesterday afternoon.”

“Good point.”

He turned his eyes on me and it was like being under a full moon. “When you are ready to stop killing yourself I will be there to help.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

***

The trip boiled down to a leapfrog from bathroom to bathroom. We didn’t even make the Amarillo city limits before Andrew started hopping on one foot and whining.

“Why not hook him up with one of Shane’s catheters,” I suggested.

Marcella said, “Maurey,” and Lloyd cut his eyes at me like I’d made a social blunder.

Critter pretzeled her legs and made her thumbs and index fingers into little O’s and hummed into the smoke. Shane explained the sex life of armadillos.

“The egg is fertilized months before the female attaches it to the uterus wall and begins gestation. She always has quadruplets, and they are always all four the same sex. I once saw two armadillos having oral sex, but I don’t know if they were the same sex or not. The woman whose car I was riding in refused to stop after we ran over them. I’ve always regretted not returning to inspect the bodies. Homosexuality is fairly rare in animals.”

“I knew a dog that would hump anything or anyone,” I said.

“That’s what you said about your husband,” Marcella said.

Shane didn’t like being interrupted. “We’re not discussing dry-humping dogs. We’re discussing oral sex in the animal kingdom.”

“What’s dry humping?” Andrew yelled. He was coloring Moby Dick’s interior walls. Gave the ambulance the feel of a hippy bus, but Lloyd didn’t seem to mind. He was staring at Sharon’s picture, searching for a clue, I guess.

“Why chase after a wife who’s hiding from you?” I asked.

Lloyd didn’t answer—just looked at the picture, then out the window, then down at the picture again.

Critter’s home was in Comanche, Oklahoma, which she showed me on the map as a dot down south near the Red River. Way the heck out of our way, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really care where we went so long as we didn’t get there. Getting somewhere would mean I had to start feeling again and figuring a way to wrest Auburn from his evil prick of a father.

“Is Hugo still following?” Marcella asked.

I could see the big Oldsmobile in the side mirror. He’d dropped back behind two pickups and a black limousine, tailing us like a detective in the
Mike Shane Mystery
magazine. “Yeah, he’s back there.”

“He’s just being stubborn. He’s afraid losing his family will make him look bad at the Presbyterian church.”

“Hugo’s a religious adulterer?”

“He joined the church to play softball. The Northside Presbyterians have the best team in the Panhandle.”

Critter said, “God is in us all.”

***

The road was weird. It was a four-lane divided highway but with curbs like a town street instead of shoulders like a normal highway. I kept being afraid the right trailer tire would drift over and scrape, so I tended to keep it close to the middle, which pissed off the Texans who wanted to pass. One man shook his fist at me. After years of watching people flip each other off, his expression of anger seemed almost wholesome.

In Memphis, Texas, we turned east on this state highway about the width of a Ping-Pong table. Every time a semi-truck came at us we about crashed mirrors. Made me tense.

A billboard for
Mildred’s Manure
read “We’re Number 1 with Number 2.” Four white crosses next to the road marked the spot where four people had died in traffic accidents. In Hollis, Oklahoma, a sign outside a church read “The road to God is always under construction.”

“I know a man in Hollis can cover his entire nose with his lower lip,” Shane said. “Maybe we should stop and see him.”

I felt fingers on my neck and almost jumped through the windshield.

Critter said, “Relax, think about a cool place where the grass is green and the water pure and cold.”

Home. “What the hell are you doing? Did I say you could touch me?”

“These muscles are tight as guitar strings. I’ve never met anyone so Saturn-squared. Even Freedom isn’t this tight after an all-night run to Dallas.”

My automatic impulse was to reject kindness from an airhead—it seemed the strong thing to do—but her fingers felt nice. All the way through the muscles and blood to the bones, everything gave an inch. “What’s Freedom?”

She kneaded the base of my neck. “He’s my man. Freedom is kind and gentle. He travels freely on the sixth level. Wrap your mind around that. I’ve never even seen past the fog of level five. Sometimes I have corporeal thoughts, jealousy, hunger, yangy stuff like that.”

“Nothing wrong with jealousy and hunger if that’s how you feel.”

“Freedom is immune to pain. He has surrounded himself with an invisible hedge of protection.”

Her fingers were firm and strong. Her words were the droolings of a droid whose brains had been scooped at birth, but I ignored the words and heard the voice. Her voice was a ballad sung to a baby by a mother who didn’t take her clothes off at rodeos. It was like being in the mountains alone. I must have been starved for human touch because I didn’t care that Critter was a girl or, even worse, a girl who said “karma” and “yangy” and had a man named Freedom. You know, sometimes it’s good for people to touch each other without sexual undertones. Some of my best friends are people I haven’t fucked.

Critter’s voice drifted into a soft rhythm punctuated by the bass of Shane’s lecture on trucks or truck drivers or whatever. Driving the divide in the geometric design of road, telephone poles, fences, fields, I floated back to Lloyd’s offer to be there when I decided to stop. I’d taken the offer as a nose-in-my-business, but he meant well. Lloyd was wise to the point of being guruish when it came to things other than his wife.

Fact: Someday, in the distant future, I would have to face reality and stop drinking alcohol. It would be a pain in the ass but I could stop. I could. Lloyd had stopped. Shane had stopped. Surely if old winos could pull themselves together enough to get off the juice, so could I. But it was such a cheat to be forced to stop. Other people drink whiskey all the time and no one says they are killing themselves.