Western Swing (15 page)

Buggie's present-opening method was more or less unique to my experience. He didn't tear on the ends or seams. Instead, he clawed right at the middle of the package until he'd gouged a hole, then he ripped the wrapping paper into strips. The floor looked like refuse from a New York City ticker tape parade before he finally dug his way into the next-to-last box and pulled the turtle out by one of its ears. He sat back, staring at the turtle seriously.

“I didn't know turtles have ears,” Ann said.

“I didn't know they have baseball caps.”

“Eekle,” Buggie said.

Ann laughed, warm and at home. “No, it's a turtle. Turtle like in the rabbit and turtle story.”

Buggie looked over at us. “Eekle.”

Ann set down her coffee mug and leaned forward. I could tell she was pleased with Buggie's reaction to the turtle. At least he hadn't thrown it into the pile and gone on to the next unwrapping job. “What should we name him?” she asked.

Buggie held the turtle to his chest, “Hawiet.”

“Harriet,” I said. “That's a girl's name. Why would you name a boy turtle a girl's name?”

“He can name her anything he likes.”

“Hawiet.”

While Buggie crawled toward the big O. Henry package, Ann took our cups to the kitchen for more coffee and rum. I watched Buggie drag Harriet around the big box, muttering to her or him, whatever the turtle was, in some language that runs between babies and stuffed animals. I couldn't help but wonder if my mom felt this together-with-a-spot-in-the-world glow on my second Christmas. Or Garret's. Or Patrick's. It seemed impossible not to feel worthwhile and loving under these conditions, but if Mom had felt something good then, I wondered what happened later. Could the same thing ever happen between Buggie and Ann that had happened between my mom and me? Or Ann and her dad? This was a depressing line of wondering. How could something so simple as a parent's love for a child get so complicated? The worst things in life are always the best things gone bad.

“Here,” Ann said. She handed me a package.

“What's this?”

“Your present, silly.”

“What is it?”

“Open it and find out.” I daresay those five lines were being repeated in six million homes across America at that very instant. There's something nice about tradition. It doesn't have to be original.

I held off on my gift a few minutes, savoring the feeling. Besides, Buggie was on the edge of discovering literature. He tore straight through the top of the paper, completely unwrapping the box before lifting the top flap. Then he reached in and right-hand-threw the first book at the television. The second was left-handed into the tree. Once all the books lay scattered around on the floor, Buggie tipped the box sideways and crawled in. He sat in the box, holding Harriet by a flipper and looking out at us with those melting panda bear eyes. I could have cried from love.

Ann sighed. “Oh, look, don't you wish we had a camera.”

I smiled because deep in my sock crib was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic I hadn't had time to wrap. “Maybe Santa will bring one next year,” I said.

“Next year he'll be too big.”

“For what?”

Ann's present to me was a pair of woollysock slippers with leather soles and a red monkey head on the front. While Ann looked proud, I kicked off my flip-flops and tried them on. They felt real comfortable and warm, but I wasn't completely happy about the monkey heads.

I hugged Ann. “Thanks, darlin'.”

“Loren, this is the best Christmas of my life.”

We kissed a long time until I started to get excited and slid a hand down to her breast. Ann had very sensitive breasts, I guess because she'd nursed Buggie for so long. I could almost always get her wet by touching her breasts.

“Maybe we ought to go back to bed while he plays with his toys,” I murmured.

Before Ann could answer, Buggie took off up the Christmas tree. I heard a sound like a
pop
and opened my eyes in time to glimpse a shaking tree; then it fell, breaking bulbs, shorting out lights, knocking a philodendron into the turntable, crashing both to the floor. I jumped the end table and waded into the mess, knee-deep in branches, pine needles, and wrapping paper. I couldn't find Buggie. I couldn't hear Buggie. He should have been screaming his little head off, but, when I froze for a moment, I couldn't hear a thing.

Ann was on her knees beside me, digging through the branches, her eyes jittering around, all whites like a wild horse when it's scared. I jumped from the pile and lifted the whole tree up by the four-legged base. Buggie lay on his back, covered with needles, looking up at us with that expression on his face. That Buggie's-been-betrayed-again expression.

Ann scooped him up and hugged and cried and ran around the room until Buggie got the idea and started crying also. He looked okay to me, just a little surprised. I think Ann's carrying on affected him more than the fall. Ann circled the room three or four times, too worked up to settle in one spot. Finally she stopped and glared at me. “Don't you ever kiss me in front of Buggie again.”

That seemed like an odd thing to say. “You think Buggie climbed the tree because we were kissing?”

“Why else? Every time I start to feel good, something bad happens. I'm not going to feel good anymore.”

“Ann, that's not rational.”

“Who says I'm supposed to be rational?”

All day, Ann concentrated on feeling as depressed as possible so nothing bad would happen to us. She didn't even perk up when I gave her the unwrapped camera. To watch her fussing around the apartment, roaming from place to place, yet never letting Buggie leave her sight, you'd think this wasn't Christmas and we weren't all together.

• • •

Maybe her “act the opposite of how you feel” logic worked because the day before New Year's Eve, something good happened. We found a two-bedroom duplex on the same block as Ann's day-care center. The duplex was blue with a big fenced-in backyard, a single garage, and a private patio next to a rock garden with some prickly plants that weren't dead. Ann and I talked in plurals about the duplex.
Our
bathroom.
Our
broken oven.
We
should find a set of chairs for
our
kitchen. For the first time, I didn't feel as if I was living in someone else's place.

Ann had been poor for so long, she'd become a real pro at secondhand-store shopping. Not that I hadn't been poor as long as Ann, it's just that I don't have standards when it comes to my surroundings. A foam rubber pad on the floor and a phone company cable spool were good enough for me. I never had the patience for the secondhand circuit.

Ann had plenty of patience for both of us. We made all the rounds; found a beautiful iron bed frame at the Salvation Army, an overstuffed rocker and love seat at the St. Vincent de Paul Store, a firm mattress and springs at a garage sale in Aurora, and best of all, two long chests of drawers with most of the paint and some of the knobs still like new. No more baby bed storage.

“We can get rid of the cribs now,” I said, though I should have known better. No woman has fourteen places for babies to sleep unless she wants them.

Tears formed. “I like my cribs. Some of these have been with me since the Divine Light. Look, see this spot? Buggie knocked a tooth out right there, and Joyce gave me that one on Thamu Kamala's third birthday. Jesse swallowed a peach pit and almost died in that one. I saved him. How could I throw out the crib Jesse was in when I saved his life?”

“We don't need them anymore.”

“We don't need your desk either.”

Ann and I compromised. We carried all the various bits of baby paraphernalia out to the garage except for three especially meaningful pieces. I had a hell of a time getting them all in, had to pile the frames and little mattresses two deep, baby beds on bottom, cribs, cradles, and bassinets on top. You'd think Ann was having her cat put to sleep. She said bye-bye to each piece.

“The beds will still be here when you need them.”

“It's not the same, Loren.”

I shut the garage door and, so far as I know, neither one of us saw those cribs again for four years.

She shouldn't have threatened my desk. It was a beautiful desk I found sitting next to a Goodwill Industries dumpster in the Cinderella City parking lot. Like to never fit it in the backseat of my car. My desk was a slightly larger version of the one I sat behind in the second grade—chair welded permanently to the desk legs, pen trough on the far side of the sloping top. The lid flapped open so if I wanted anything from inside, I had to clear the top and stack all my papers and typewriter on the floor.

I loved that desk. Loved typing at a fifteen-degree angle and doodling Charlie Brown pictures on the wood. For authenticity, I ruined a steak knife carving
and
on my chair, so when I typed a long time and stood up, you could read LOREN LOVES ANN and SENIORS '68 on my butt—if you could see my butt.

The desk didn't see much use that spring, though. I finished the Western in October, and by January, schoolwork had lost its charm. This was the last semester of my senior year and all my classes were required subjects I'd been avoiding since high school. Geometry. Botany. Ethics. What does an English major need with ethics? Even my English classes bored me silly. “Jonathan Yardley's Place in the History of Literary Criticism” and “Major Colorado Poets.” Like any writer, in fact like anybody I've ever met, including critics, I think the literary critic belongs in the same category as the blowfly. And Jonathan Yardley is to literary criticism what belladonna is to the dry mouth. As to “Major Colorado Poets,” the quality drops off dramatically after Peter Pym, the Western Shakespeare.

My New Year's resolution was to survive the semester and graduate. Within a couple of weeks, I realized I'd set my sights too high and modified the goal to survival until Easter vacation. By Lincoln's birthday it was survive until Friday afternoon. The ethics class was the worst. Ethics must be my tragic deficiency.

• • •

Spring break we drove across Idaho to visit Ernest Hemingway. Ann wanted to see Zion National Park, but I had something important to discuss and Hemingway was the closest dead writer of major magnitude. I promised her Zion in the summer, a false promise because events came up that summer and Ann never made it to Zion. I feel kind of bad about that.

The trip was a disappointment. Buggie caught the croup, or what Ann called croup, the cabin we rented came without hot water, the Chevelle threw a radiator hose, and, the real disappointment, Hemingway didn't provide any answers. The bum hardly provided any waves, just a few weak hisses, more like swamp gas than immortality. I've always suspected that macho woman-bull-lion-killer act hid a shallow personality. Maybe his heroes showed no emotions because Hemingway had none himself. I don't see any use in admiring a person without emotions.

Almost a foot of slushy snow covered the grave, but that's no excuse. If emanations can pierce the coffin and six feet of dirt, snow should be child's play. A dead greeting card designer could vibe through a foot of snow. It may be that Hemingway used up his creativity in life—I can respect that. What good does creativity do a dead man? Still, you'd think something would be left, a few inventive ashes or something. Of course, I'm not Hemingway's type. It could be that way down in the ground, he sensed an antihero overhead, a wimp who likes women and thinks bullfights and wars are silly, and he decided not to emit while I was in the vicinity. Figures the self-idolizer would turn into a snobby corpse.

Still, I was disappointed. I loved my family, they made being alive mean something, but we'd been together a year and that first rush of mattering was slacking off a bit. With graduation looming in the near future, I needed some reassurance that life was more than a personal adventure. I'd decided happiness meant a lot, but I wanted something else—something bigger than love between two mortal people.