Sorrow Floats (22 page)

“I deserve this drink.”

Lloyd wrestled the shifter rod into second and pulled out on U.S. 270. “You’ve said that same thing each day since we met.”

“I’ve deserved a drink each day since we met.”

“What happens on days you don’t deserve a drink?”

On the edge of town we passed a stockyard jammed to the gills with pigs—Band-Aid-colored snouts and screwy tails as far as the eye could see.

“We raised a hog once,” I said. “Dad named her Dolores Del Rio and she was gross, ate her own shit along with six puppies, a bag of charcoal briquettes, and my school copy of D. H. Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers
. I was never so happy to slaughter anything in my life.”

Lloyd went into third and repeated himself. “What happens on days you don’t deserve a drink?”

“Look. I just killed a snake and lost all my money. My hands are still shaking. If I ever deserved a drink in my life, I deserve this one.”

“I’m not disagreeing. I only wondered what happens on days you don’t deserve to drink.”

“I don’t drink.” I said that before I thought whether it was true or not, but after a few moments’ consideration I decided to believe myself. The last two weeks had been daily trauma—surely I earned my escapism after losing a child and blowing a suicide—and before that life had been so boring and tedious, alcohol made the unbearable barely bearable. Since Dad died the only days I didn’t deserve a drink were the five spent in a coma.

“Deserving drinks is an interesting notion,” Lloyd said.

“If you’re going to lecture, I’ll climb in back where I’m appreciated.”

My tough-broad reputation had risen considerably in the back two-thirds of the ambulance. In an instant, Andrew changed from irritating brat to irritating hero worshiper—following me around the park like a lost lamb, crawling into my lap every time I sat down. He was only partially disenchanted when I refused to wear the dead snake around my neck.

Brad was too cool to actively fawn or anything, but when I twisted around in the passenger’s seat to argue with Shane on the Eve-snake relationship in the Garden of Eden, Brad was bent over his art pad sketching my face.

As usual, Shane pontificated. “Woman has for all time been terrified of the serpent because of the distinct possibility that one could ooze into her womb and nest. It’s an ovarian reaction.”

I said, “Bull. Women are no more afraid of snakes than men. I didn’t see you wheeling down there to save the kid.”

“I knew the snake to be harmless.”

“Maurey didn’t know that,” Marcella said. “What she did was just as heroic as if it was an adder.”

“Oh, my God, an adder,” Shane said with sarcasm. He tried to denigrate my snake battle, but even Shane looked at me a tad differently. He hadn’t called me
little missy
in over an hour.

When Andrew dropped his Coke it blew foam on Brad’s art work and Marcella’s rayon dress, which caused a scramble. Andrew whined for another Coke while Brad dramatically ripped the soiled page from his pad and Shane explained how the FBI made Coca-Cola take the cocaine out of its secret formula but each year the company whips up a batch of original recipe for its upper-echelon officers and select members of the executive branch of government.

I turned to Lloyd. “Does it feel to you that we’re establishing a pattern here on the road?”

He squinted into the side mirror. “I think we got us a family unit.”

***

Dear Dad,

Here’s what I think. I might pick a date, like three months from today, and that’ll be the day to stop drinking and turn serious. Meantime I can get it out of my system. How does that idea strike you?

I need you now,

Merle Jean Pierce

P.S. I killed a snake.

***

I named the tequila bottle Elvis because Shane had been yammering about him off and on all day, telling bizarre stories in which he saved Elvis’s life or career. Shane claimed to be the entire background chorus on “Blue Christmas.” “I did four tracks of
Blue-blue-blues
in harmony with myself,” he said. “Elvis said colored girls couldn’t have done better.”

I also named the tequila Elvis because he was the king and I’d killed a king snake, which metaphorically made me the Elvis killer. Personally, I’d never been that hot for his music—too much hips for country, too much Brylcreem for rock ’n’ roll—but it was an okay name for tequila. “Gimme an Elvis, straight up.” “I shoot Elvis with lemon and salt.”

The worst social blunder I ever made in my life—before the Auburn-on-the-roof deal—was made on tequila. You ever do something so embarrassing you relive it over and over when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Something so rotten it affects your self-image from that day on?

Sophomore year at Laramie, I wasn’t ready for a test in Psych 101, so I spent a snowy afternoon sitting in my dorm room staring out the window and doing shots of Cuervo Silver. My roommate, Betsy, was concerned about my welfare, and she convinced me to go downstairs to the cafeteria for supper.

Big mistake. Someone was ribbing Lucy Jane Andrews from Thermopolis about biting a boy’s tongue when he French-kissed her on the first date, and she said, “At least I didn’t get pregnant before puberty.”

The other three girls at the table sniggered and slid their eyes at me. I’d been hearing that crap for six years and learned to roll with it as the price you pay for being different, but this time I cracked. I could blame Cuervo or cafeteria food, but the truth is no one is responsible for this gig but me.

“Lucy Jane,” I said too loudly, “had an accident in her white linen skirt a few years back and now she wears tampons every single day and every single night of the month. She hasn’t been out of the bathroom without a plug in since she left high school.”

Polly St. Michel tittered. I turned on her. “What are you laughing at? Your stepbrother raped you when you were twelve and now you can’t ever have a baby.” I turned on everybody at once. “You cat women are always gossiping about my daughter. Well, at least I’m honest, I don’t hide ugly little secrets.”

Betsy defended herself. “We don’t all hide ugly secrets.”

“Who’ll go upstairs in fifteen minutes and make herself vomit like she does after every meal?” The cafeteria got real quiet as I fired my final shot at Dory Crandall. The poor girl had never been anything but kind to me. One midnight she told me her secret because the guilt was driving her to meekness. “And who slept with her best friend’s boyfriend the day before they got married? I’ll bet the happy bride would love to know that one.”

Only when I paused for breath and looked in their faces did I realize I’d gone too far. All my female friendships were dead meat. Even others who weren’t at the table would never trust me now, for good reason. In cowboy terms, I’d shot myself in the foot. In the head.

“Tell me about your dad,” Lloyd said.

“What?”

“You write him postcards every day, but he’s dead.”

“Who told you my father is dead?”

“You did, yesterday when the highway patrolman stopped us. Don’t you remember?”
Don’t you remember?
Always digging at me; sometimes I wished Lloyd were more like Shane. Shane didn’t care whether I drank myself to death or not.

A picture of Buddy formed in my mind—six four, black bush of a beard, voice that reverberated with authority. “Dad was like what you think of as God.”

Lloyd kept his Jesus eyes on the road. “What’s that mean?”

I thought in terms of honesty. What are God’s characteristics? “Remote. Perfect, yet remote. God knows everything you do, but nothing you do affects him one way or the other.”

“Your God must not be Southern Baptist.”

“The county only decided to plow the ranch road a couple years ago, so back when I started school Mom and Petey and I lived in town all winter while Dad stayed on the mountain. I didn’t see him on a day-to-day basis.”

“It’s tricky loving someone you don’t see. They tend to get built into dream people.” I guess Lloyd was relating my deal to his wife, Sharon.

I two-handed a slug of Elvis. “Mom was petty. She couldn’t stand a cat hair on her curtains, or she’d go berserk if a bee got loose in the car. She spent hours worrying about the characters on a soap opera.”

“All moms are like that,” Lloyd said.

“But Dad treated her like a fairy princess, even after she started flipping out. He took everything she said seriously.”

“So, do you hate him or her for that?”

“Nothing I did affected him. When the baby was born, he still wouldn’t come out of the mountains. Shannon and I lived at Sam and Lydia’s while Dad took care of the horses.”

I sucked in one hell of a good pull on Elvis. “Dad’s not dead. He’s gone to San Francisco on business.”

Brad was listening in back. He spoke up in the voice of a fourteen-year-old. “My dad used to wake me up at night and make me hide in the bathroom while Mom turned a trick in my bed.”

I said, “Oh.”

I tried to get Sam Callahan to write a story about dry mouth once. He could have a character whose mission in life was to develop a drug that didn’t cause next-day ashtray lips.

“It’d be a quest story,” I said.

“I only deal in universal concepts.”

“What concept is more universal than waking up with a dry mouth?”

Of course he didn’t write my story; he’d rather write about Jesus playing baseball.

Lloyd shook me awake to darkness and a mythic dry mouth. He said, “We need gas.”

My lips made a frog-stuck-in-mud sound. Lloyd handed me a canteen he usually saved for the radiator and repeated himself. “We need gas. You have anything to trade for gas?”

I didn’t even swallow the water, just let it soak into my tongue like rain on dust. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Since you finished your bottle. We tried to wake you for supper.”

Moby Dick sat in a parking lot on the edge of a dark town. A hundred yards or so away lights shone through the windows of an Alka-Seltzer-shaped building. “I’m disoriented here, Lloyd. You got a fix on time or place? Why is everything shiny?”

He bent to squint through the windshield up at the sky. “Been raining. Two-thirty, maybe three. Some town in Arkansas. That building says ‘Trojans’ on the front.”

“Looks like a high school.”

“There’s a couple buses down there where we can borrow gas, only we need payment.”

I unbuckled my seat belt, opened Moby Dick’s door, and breathed in the wet night air. To tell the truth, I felt like honest death. A tequila hangover is more elemental than Yukon Jack’s. Imagine six hundred paper cuts on your brain.

“What’s wrong with Coors?” Behind me Andrew giggled in his sleep and Shane snored like a rhino.

“Nothing’s open,” Lloyd said. “We have to steal the gasoline, and it doesn’t feel right leaving beer. What if the people we steal it from are AA?”

I tipped my head and drank nearly a quart of water. Lloyd stayed patient. If I had to sum up Lloyd Carbonneau in one word, that’s the one I would say—patient.

“We’re talking a narrow line of ethics here, Lloyd. It’s okay to trade illegal beer for gasoline but not okay to steal it unless we leave something of value and not right if the thing we leave is beer?”

He thought awhile, then said, “Yes.”

“Just wanted to clarify my thoughts.”

“I have a battery charger we could trade, but we might need it later. Aren’t you carrying anything worth a few gallons?”

Dad’s creel was on the floor. In the hidden pocket I found the keys to the Bronco and what was now Dothan’s house and the silver hoop earrings Shannon gave me for Christmas. I held the earrings in the palm of my hand. “There’s these, but they mean something to me. I’d just as soon leave Coors and not worry about right and wrong.”

“How about that box?”

“The creel?” I ran my fingertips along the wicker and saw Dad standing in the Firehole River in his hip boots holding a cutthroat by the gills for Mom to
ooh
over.

Lloyd said, “Bus drivers can use a fishing box; unless they’re married earrings won’t do them much good.”

What would Dad want me to do? Hell with that, what would I want me to do? I started transferring Carmex and junk from the creel to Sam Callahan’s day pack. “Another piece of Dad bites the dust.”

“It’s good for you to let him go.”

“I won’t let him go for less than twenty gallons.”

***

Which was bravado. We only had a five-gallon reserve tank and two one-gallon Coleman fuel cans. “Let’s make two trips,” I said.

“Seven gallons will get us into Memphis, where we can trade for more. I used to know people in Memphis.”

We stood outside watching the rain drip on puddles and shapes pass back and forth behind the windows of what I took as a gymnasium. Beyond it the school lurked the way schools lurk at night. Closer to us, three school buses lined up under a security light facing the highway.

“I’m new at this, Lloyd. How do we steal gas from a school bus?”

Lloyd reached in under the driver’s seat to pull out a hose—four feet or so of that semi-clear stuff you string between beakers in high school chemistry. “We charge it on the Idaho credit card.”

“You always carry a siphon hose?” I asked.

He reached back in for a flashlight, which he handed to me. “First time we ran out of gas in Mexico I had to use Shane’s catheter.”

“Ouch.”

“This hose is the one auto accessory Shane paid for himself.”

***

Lloyd squatted in the gravel and sucked hose. After a few seconds his head jerked and he spit gasoline.

“Good thing schools always fill buses at the end of the day instead of mornings,” he said. “The hose wouldn’t reach anything less than a full tank.”

“Where did you learn schools gas up in the afternoon?”

Lloyd shrugged his bare shoulders. “You pick things up.”

The flow of gas into the tank made a tinkle sound, like Andrew peeing in a puddle. This didn’t shape up as a quick operation. I checked out the lights in the gymnasium—lit rooms on dark nights bring out the voyeur in me.

“Keep an eye posted for the police,” Lloyd said. “If they come, we flatten and roll under the bus.”

“They’ll see our cans.”

“Probably.”

Streetlights from the town glowed against the low clouds off to the east. West, it was Moby Dick, Hugo Sr., then blackness.

I nodded at the idling Oldsmobile. “That guy’s starting to give me the willies.”

Lloyd glanced back at Hugo. “He’s only staying close to his family.”

“Can’t he take a hint? Marcella doesn’t want him close to his family.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know what else to do.”

“Let’s paint a sign on the back of the ambulance that says ‘Too late, dickhead.’”

Lloyd bent to check the flow. “Forgiveness isn’t one of your strong points.”

“Forgiveness is for the pope. If a man nails around on his wife, he deserves to pay. Else every man would be nailing every woman. Fear is all that keeps pistols in the holster.”

“How about loyalty?”

“Sam Callahan wrote that a stiff dick hath no conscience.”

Lloyd spit again and I handed him the water I’d been hauling around ever since I woke up. He swished his mouth, gargled a moment, and spit.

“We all made mistakes, Maurey. You more than anyone should understand forgiveness. You’ll never get your baby back without it.”

I couldn’t settle on a rational comeback. After tequila, though, rational isn’t necessary for speech. “My mistakes have excuses. Hugo’s don’t.”

“How do you know his story?”

“There can be no excuse for adultery by males.”

“As opposed to females?”

“I can think of several reasons a woman might have to commit adultery.”

Lloyd smiled, pretending I was kidding. Maybe I was, maybe not, I don’t know. In certain situations women do deserve more slack than men. That’s because men made the rules. They’re the house and women are the gamblers, and everyone knows the only way a gambler can beat the house is to cheat.

“If Hugo lasts another day or two, I’ll vote that she takes him back,” Lloyd said.

“That’s because you want Sharon to take you back and you know she probably won’t.”

His head came up. “Why not?”

Words came in a rush. “Sharon was a little girl when she married you, Lloyd. She’s grown up by now. You can’t expect to find the same girl who loved you years ago.”

“Yes, I can,” he said.

“This search is stupid.”

The web of lines around his eyes went hurt child. I swear, I should be quarantined from sensitive men. The government could create a pain zone one hundred yards away from me in all directions. Put up
Keep Out
signs like they do on the trails when a grizzly gets mean.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If anyone deserves forgiveness, you do.”

Lloyd reached out to make a minuscule hose adjustment. “We had a nice sunset this afternoon. Too bad you were asleep and missed it.”

“I had that coming.” He didn’t disagree, so I said, “I’m going for a walk while this deal fills up. No use both of us loitering at the scene of the crime.”

***

Lloyd had simplified life to Ivanhoesque terms: one single obstacle stands between me and happiness, and if I can overcome that obstacle, all problems will cease to exist. Lloyd’s peace of mind through the hard times was based on the lie that if he found his precious Sharon, they would automatically come together in rapture and love and all would be right with the world. So to speak. As it were.

My ethical question, wandering aimlessly through the damp parking lot, was, did I do the right thing? Is peace of mind based on a he better than no peace of mind at all?

I’d known other people who blamed all misfortune on one fixable fact. Fat people, for instance. There’s no one more depressed than a fat person who loses one hundred pounds and discovers the thin can be lonely, too. Or those southern women who are trained that by being pretty, sweet, and available, a man will swoop down and make everything nice. Ivanhoe swoops down and nothing changes except the women stop being pretty, sweet, and available.

I suspected sobriety of the same trick. Every chatterbox in America took for granted that if I quit drinking I’d win my baby Auburn back. If I quit drinking I would fall in love with a prince rather than a shithead. And the prince would fall in love with me. They said if I quit drinking my life would find direction and everything in the vicinity of it would no longer be ugly, turgid, and meaningless.

How the hell did they know? Sober women marry creeps. Sober women lose children. What if the deal was a colossal hoax, I abandoned the only dependable lover I’ve ever had—Yukon Jack—and afterward woke up to zippo? Emptiness? I could get screwed here.

I did the moth thing and drew toward the light. Five or six cars of the decade-old variety were parked close to a double-loading door, which I avoided. My tack was to stay on the dark edge of the parking area, then drift around the side of the Alka-Seltzer away from the highway. I found some glass doors, but they only looked in on a lobby-like room with two trophy cases flanking a large mosaic of a Trojan soldier’s helmet.

The trophy cases were lit by those tube lights they mount above paintings in art museums. The trophies were mainly for football with a smattering of fake-gold statuettes wearing shorts to indicate basketball and track. Not a skiing or rodeo trophy in the bunch.

Off left of the doors I discovered a ledge forty feet or so up that circled the building and passed in front of a bank of way-high windows. The fire escape was a piece of cake. I could have climbed it smashed.

The ledge itself was somewhat narrow for my tastes—I’m no mountain goat—and it was wet and sloped like five degrees the wrong way, but the windows were framed in concrete that made an okay handhold. Once past the side of the frame, I planted my elbows on the lower lip and cupped my hands around my eyes to peer in at the Land of Oz.

It was neat. Ten feet high, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion stood on one side of an immense throne, facing Toto and Judy Garland. Toto had a Pomeranian look about the nose and ears. Judy Garland’s hair was in pigtails.

Just guessing, I’d say tomorrow was prom night and the junior class or whoever does these things in Arkansas was transforming the gym into a theme park. Mainly the transformation required a heck of a lot of emerald green crepe paper.

A dozen teenagers moved around the room, drinking Cokes and laughing and putting on finishing touches. They must have had a glitter fight earlier because the kids sparkled, especially their hair. The girls wore shorts, the boys jeans; everyone was barefoot.

A boy who looked so much like Park my breath caught was painting a yellow brick road on an entire wall of butcher paper. The road receded up the wall through a forest filled with Munchkins and flying monkeys. At the bottom edge where the road came off the paper it met a yellow carpet strip that ran across the floor to the throne.

A girl straddling the top of a ladder called something to the Park-boy. He set down his brush and walked over to the ladder, where he picked a crown off the floor and, taking two steps up the ladder, lifted it to the girl. She had blond, bouncy hair and was wearing white shorts and an off-white pullover jersey. As she reached down to take the crown their fingers touched and they smiled in each other’s eyes.
Bing.
I wanted to cry.

“You finished?” Lloyd’s quiet voice came from below.

I looked down. “Are you?”

“Gas is in. All we need now is to prime the carburetor and hit the road.”

I looked back in to where the girl was balancing the crown at an angle on the Scarecrow’s two-dimensional head. Park was frozen, gazing up at her like a dancer in a musical who’s been told not to move a muscle till the starlet finishes her solo.

“I’ll be right down.”

Back on ground level, Lloyd asked, “See anything interesting?”

“The Land of Oz.”

“Was it nice?”

“At my prom we did Camelot better.”