Authors: Tim Sandlin
“Hurting me was his way of regaining his pride,” Shannon said, “but now I’m totally paranoid. I saw people sniffing on the plane, and I was sure they were sniffing me. I worry about it all the time.”
“You shouldn’t let assholes control you.”
“I know that. What I don’t know is how he came up with the idea. Sometimes when people say things to be cruel, they’re telling the truth.”
“Okay.” Roger didn’t move. He was wondering what life would be like with this woman, if they were fated to be a couple, which evidently was what she had in mind. She seemed to have been raised to think abnormal behavior was normal. Roger had little experience distinguishing normal from abnormal. He was, after all, the boy whose entire sexual history consisted of pregnant teens. But he had some grasp of what regular women do and don’t do, and asking a man you’ve only gotten to know that day and never been with conjugally to smell your snatch didn’t seem regular.
Shannon blamed me for her way of accepting bizarre behavior as commonplace, and I blamed Lydia. Lydia didn’t think about such things.
“Well,” Shannon said.
“Well, what?”
“Will you?”
Roger glanced over at Oly and started shrugging down into the sheets.
“It’s vitally important that you be honest,” Shannon said. “No matter how much you may think I don’t want to hear the truth, you have to give it to me. If I can’t trust you on this, I’ll never be able to trust you and I’ll go on being paranoid. I might turn into one of those high-strung women who can’t leave their house and communicates with folks through a mail slot.”
Roger’s voice came from deep under the covers. “I’ll tell the truth.”
Shannon lifted the sheet with her fingertips to give Roger air. “You’d better, or we might as well call it quits right here.”
Roger’s cheek brushed Shannon’s breast as he scrunched low in the bed. In the pitch-blackness, he felt heat rising off her stomach. She was soft as a rose petal down there, not like the over-inflated volleyball skin he’d felt on the eight-months-along girls. Most of them had not encouraged Roger to go down. They were too young or too pregnant to feel comfortable with the procedure, so Roger had little experience at slithering down a bed. The sheets were tucked tightly. He had to crumple his legs in an uncomfortable way. Shannon did nothing—such as sliding toward the headboard—to help.
She said, “Well?”
He said, “Just a minute.”
He found the hem of her panties and lifted it away from her skin.
“Don’t touch,” Shannon said. “We don’t want to start something we can’t stop. Just smell.”
Roger sniffed. He smelled talcum powder and maybe some fabric softener, but not much else. He said, “I’m coming up.”
After Roger hunched back up Shannon’s body and into the original position, she said, “Give it to me straight.”
“Lemon drops,” he said.
“Don’t mess with me.”
“And fresh snow on sagebrush.”
Shannon smiled. She couldn’t recall smelling fresh snow on sagebrush, but it sounded pleasant. Damp, maybe, but not too damp. More of a bracing chill. She liked sage. “What else?”
“The tiniest hint of clove, or cinnamon. I’m not sure which, but whatever it is reminds me of pies on Christmas.”
“No fish?”
“No fish. Just clean air after a spring rain.”
They cuddled quietly. Shannon didn’t buy clove, cinnamon, or spring rain, but she was reassured about the fish. He wouldn’t have been nearly so quick with the answers if he’d had to lie in a bad way.
Shannon said, “All men are full of shit, Roger, but you carry it off with style.”
***
The kid slept with his mouth open and one hand under his cheek like a curly-haired angel child. A drool track traced off his lower lip edge. His neck sported a bruise the size of a Mandarin orange. Lydia wondered when she had inflicted the bruise. It had been a long night, and she’d introduced him to new concepts. The boy was a quick study.
There’s good sex and mediocre sex, and then on an entirely separate plane, there’s sex that makes you feel good about yourself and sex that makes you feel bad about yourself. Warren had started as mediocre, but after training, he’d evolved into decent. His technique with young girls would never be the same, anyway.
But good, mediocre, or decent, the sex had not made Lydia feel good about herself. The truth is, she felt like a monster. Her stomach gorge rose up against the gag reflex. Her sinuses throbbed.
She blamed Hank in every way. Hank had ruined all forms of pleasure for her by asking for nothing. If he’d ask her to stay monogamous while he was in prison, she could have said,
Fuck you,
and stayed monogamous without his knowing it. He’d never asked, so she never had a wall to strike out against.
She sat, nude, in the plastic, flesh-adhering chair with her feet propped on the air conditioner, watching Warren sleep and wishing she still smoked. She could smoke if she wanted to. She couldn’t remember why she quit. Everyone had been quitting back then. Not quitting felt stupid, but she’d never been motivated by what everyone did or what wasn’t stupid. She simply hated dependencies. Lydia had a talent for walking away from dependencies.
And now there was Hank Elkrunner, her husband, her protector during the fugitive years, and the man in prison because he stood by her. Screw that.
The strong woman does not allow love to confine her. The strong woman does not feel guilt. The strong woman does not grow old needy.
Lydia lived by these words, and she was worthless without them.
Throughout her own years in prison, she had repeated them like a personal Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not be rescued by a man.
The losses started with Sparkle Horse. Sparkle Horse was a stuffed pony—fake velvet or plush, as Lydia recalled—and Sparkle Horse was her best friend when she was four, five, six, and seven. Lydia carried Sparkle Horse everywhere. She couldn’t possibly sleep without him. She chewed his ear to the point where his head was misshapen and someone first seeing him would not have recognized a horse.
Then, one fall day, Lydia’s father, Casper, invited Lydia to his golf club for lunch—a daddy/daughter affair. A big deal for both of them—only Casper wouldn’t let Lydia bring Sparkle Horse to the club dining room. Lydia spent the entire lunch sobbing. Casper said he would never bring her again.
That night after supper, Lydia threw Sparkle Horse into a huge pile of post-oak leaves. She lit a safety match, the first of her life, and dropped it onto the leaf pile. Lydia stood in the front yard in her blue jumper and T-strap sandals and watched the flames lick Sparkle Horse. Soon, thick smoke obscured him from her sight. She turned to see Casper watching from the library window. Lydia went around the house to the back door, went into her room, and lay on the bed.
Lydia never thought about Sparkle Horse again, for fifty years, until dawn at the Comfort Inn in Lompoc. Now, the grief broke through her chest. Lydia knew her entire life, from the day she burned him, would have been different if she had saved her friend. She would be different. She couldn’t understand why she had killed Sparkle Horse—Lydia didn’t think in terms of why she did what she did. In her memory, it had not been a choice. It was what she did. Tonight—Warren—was what she did. To ask why was to waste thought.
“Friday night, after Freedom took his hot little hussy and left, I couldn’t sleep. I got myself all worked up from wondering if I may have helped cause this mess,” Maurey said. “I don’t see where I had a choice, but still, if I hadn’t taken Mary Beth to Oklahoma, Freedom’s son might not have run away, and Freedom might not have snatched Roger. Fred.”
We were on a morning flight from Salt Lake City to LAX, and because we’d bought our tickets at the last possible moment, I was stuck in the middle seat of a three-seat row, between Maurey and a young woman who was weeping. The woman in the knit pantsuit was not only weeping so fiercely tears streamed down her cheeks and dripped from her pointy chin, she also had a mirror propped on the food tray and she was frying her hair with what looked like twin prongs on the end of a flashlight. Curling her hair into blonde ringlets meant sticking her left elbow into the side of my face, and between that and the weeping, I was too distracted to follow Maurey’s odd confession.
In order to keep Maurey talking, I said, “What’s that?”
“The trip I made with Shane and Lloyd in the ambulance, smuggling Coors to the South that time. We picked Mary Beth up hitchhiking in New Mexico and took her to a house full of hippies and drug fiends in Comanche, Oklahoma. Freedom was there. He was Mary Beth’s old man back when she was called Critter.”
“Boyfriend?”
Maurey nodded. “He had a kid named Hawk that he treated like trash. Hawk hid in the ambulance, and we found him a hundred miles later, near Arkansas. He changed his name to Brad and stayed with us to Carolina. He lives in France now. He’s an artist.”
Maurey had never told me much about that drive from GroVont to Georgia. It was when she jumped from practicing alcoholic to recovering alcoholic. She’s been recovering ever since. I always wondered what prompted her to stop drinking, and I was interested in finding out, but the blubbering woman kept whacking me with her elbow. She swung the prong things close to my ear, and I’ve had enough experience with teenage girls to know you don’t want to get poked by curling iron prongs.
“I’ve tried to calculate when Freedom kidnapped the child,” Maurey said. “According to what Roger told me about the
Disappearance
book, Fred was five at the time he was snatched, and Roger was eleven, maybe twelve, when Mary Beth brought him to the ranch. That would mean Freedom stole him the summer after I helped Brad run away. What if there’s a cause and effect? What if me taking one boy pushed Freedom off the deep end so far, he kidnapped another boy? That would mean I am partially responsible for Roger’s mother’s suicide.”
“That’s a pretty far guilt reach,” I said. “Ouch.”
The weeping woman had swung her curling iron into my right earlobe. I said, “Watch out.”
The woman gave me a look of helpless contempt and continued weeping and curling.
Here’s one of the big differences between living in Wyoming and living in North Carolina. A person sitting beside a weeping woman in North Carolina will offer consolation.
Can I help you, honey?
Whereas a person from Wyoming will figure the cause of the crying is none of their business, and if the woman wants help, she’ll ask for it. I’m from North Carolina, but I live in Wyoming, and we were in the air over Nevada, so I wasn’t certain what I was supposed to do. As the woman worked her way across her scalp, the weeping escalated into moaning. She was difficult to pretend to ignore.
“What are the odds of you causing a kidnapping, then raising the victim?” I said. “It’s too random to be believable.”
Maurey sipped from her rank cup of airplane coffee. She made a face and said, “It’s not random if you factor Mary Beth in as the link. She was with Freedom in Oklahoma. She brought me Roger. Freedom must have gone to Mary Beth and found out where she left the boy. But he doesn’t seem to remember I was at the house the day Brad ran away. Hell, the way that house operated, Brad could have been gone a week before Freedom noticed. He might not know I was the one who helped the kid escape.”
After one particularly gut-wrenched snivel, I broke down and intervened. Turning to the weeping woman, I said, “Are you in trouble? Do you need any help?”
The woman swung the curling iron into my face and yelled, “Stay away from me, you stupid pervert!”
I jumped away from the hot iron, bumping Maurey’s hand and spilling coffee.
Maurey said, “Jesus, Sam, what did you do this time?”
No wall topped by barbed wire, broken glass, and machine-gun turrets, no electric doors slamming shut with the finality of death, no purse search or body pat down—federal minimum security is about as intimidating as a Tucson fat farm. Loved ones don’t even meet the inmates indoors. A khaki-clad guard with all the authority of a doughnut led Lydia out back to the landscaped grounds and pointed across the grass to Hank, who sat at a picnic table next to a pecan tree, reading a book.
Lydia stood, momentarily frozen in place. She didn’t know where to start. For one thing, they’d cut his hair. I should have prepared her for Hank in a crew cut, but the damage had been done years ago, before his trial. I’d been afraid to tell her then, and after a while, I got so used to the new look that her reaction slipped my mind. The thing is, when you throw the fear of God into people, to the point where they are afraid to say anything you don’t want to hear, you risk missing out on vital information.
Lydia thought short hair made Hank look foolish, in the same way he would have looked in Bermuda shorts at the rodeo. Blackfeet warlocks had always been such a part of him, they had become mixed up in her notions of who he was. The new Hank seemed white.
Lydia fell back on her standard method of dealing with anxiety. She turned her obnoxious side loose. “Have you lost your manners in this country club?”
Hank looked up from his book and smiled. It as all Lydia could do not to launch herself into his arms.
“Lydia.” He stood up and came around the picnic table and hugged her. They were both shy, after three years, and the hug came off as awkward. First, Hank held too tightly while Lydia kind of clutched and sniffed, then Lydia melted into him and held tightly herself, when Hank was ready to break off and study her from arm’s length. Neither one of them came from a family background of easy hugs. They were both better at sex than affection.
“You’ve gained weight,” Lydia said.
Hank patted himself on the belly. He was wearing a denim shirt and green pants, nothing vaguely close to a prison uniform. “They feed me regular-like.”
“No, your new weight is muscle. They’ve turned you into one of those prison jocks who spends four hours a day in the weight room.”
“It’s either that or television,” Hank said. “I never was much for television.”
They moved back to the picnic table and sat facing each other, touching fingertips across the table. Lydia was frightened. She’d thought about the moment for so long that she didn’t know what angle to come from. She knew she had something important to explain to Hank, but she had no notion exactly what it was that was so important or how she would explain it to him even if she figured out what it was. The hair had thrown her off her rehearsed attitude.
“Are they treating you like a dirty Indian?” she asked.
Hank shook his head. “I’m older than most of the others. There’s a rumor around that I’m a wise medicine man. The kids ask my advice on spiritual matters.”
Lydia blew air out of her mouth, up toward her bangs. “You’re about as spiritual as Burger King.”
“You’d be surprised.” Hank grinned. One thing about the federal penal system, you come out with better teeth than you had going in. “If I cross my arms and say”—
deep voice—
“‘It is a good day to die’”—
normal voice—
“they think I am a Vedic seer.”
Lydia wondered when Hank had discovered Vedic seers, and if he knew they were not his sort of Indian. She had trouble telling when he was ignorant and when he was being funny. The Blackfeet sense of humor tends to be so low-key most people miss it. She picked up the book and turned it around so the title was facing her—
Okla Hanali
by R. A. Lafferty.
“It’s about a Choctaw,” Hank said.
Lydia said, “How sweet.”
She swiveled around the picnic bench to check out the grounds. A couple of men—she couldn’t tell whether they were inmates, guards, or dining room help—jogged along a path through the trees. A guy in tennis shorts and no shirt rode a lawn mower back and forth over by an outbuilding. The place seemed fairly deserted.
“Where are the dregs of society?” she asked.
“Work. Everybody has a job, and those who won’t work spend fifteen days over in maximum.” Hank nodded toward a white block of building in the distance. To Lydia, it had the architectural charm of a Costco. “That cures the lazy ones right quick,” Hank said.
Lydia turned back to Hank. “You have a job here?”
“I’m gardener to the warden. His house is down that way.”
Lydia frowned. “That makes you the head screw’s farmer.”
Hank chuckled, a low, throaty chuckle that hadn’t changed in thirty years. “I grow flowers, mostly. And trim shrubbery. He has a huge fig tree in his yard, big as any tree in Teton County. Tiny wasps live on it. They’re born in the leaves and eat the old figs. Far as I can tell, those wasps never leave that one tree their whole life.”
Lydia drummed her fingers impatiently. “What’s the metaphor, Hank? I don’t get it.”
Hank frowned down at his book. “No metaphor. Just a tree and wasps. I take care of them.”
Lydia said, “I didn’t come all this was to discuss figs. We’re here to talk about me.”
Hank sat with his fingers in the shape of a net. His unblinking gaze appeared aimed at Lydia’s breasts, but it wasn’t. He was focused about six inches this side of her, considering the options. Hank knew Lydia better than anyone else ever had, including Lydia herself. He’d made Lydia studies a life-long quest, and he knew she hadn’t risked a parole violation to drive a thousand miles just to say hello.
“So tell me,” Hank said. “How have you been?”
Her face flushed a dark shade. “Terrible. Wretched.” She searched for a more forceful way to put it. “The status quo is unacceptable. I cannot live this way, and you know that I am not exaggerating for the sake of drama. I will not tolerate this, Hank.”
“And this is?”
“You in here.” Her body language took in the entire penal system. “And me out there.”
Hank’s voice was maddeningly calm. He’d always reacted to her hysteria with maddening calmness. It was the single trait she hated most about him.
Hank said, “That’s not something we control.”
“It’s not fair that I committed the crime, but I’m free and you’re not.”
For the first time since she’d arrived, Hank registered surprise. “Fair? Since when do you demand fair? Your life has never been fair. You were born white and rich. Why did you wait till now to start complaining?
“I’ve always complained.”
“Not about fairness.”
She thought. “Okay, it isn’t fairness so much as guilt. And shame. And hatred of addiction.” Lydia looked in the distance toward maximum. “I’m so afraid of losing you, I’m terrified I’ll be forced to destroy you, like Sparkle Horse.”
“Who?”
“I cannot risk holding on until you come back home and then losing you again. What if you die? I’d rather kill you than take that chance.”
Hank reached for Lydia’s hands, but she wouldn’t cooperate. She pulled them away.
He said, “The possibility of loss is what gives life depth.”
“Just because the scum thinks you’re a Vedic seer, don’t let it go to your head.” Lydia stood up, turned around 360 degrees, and sat back down again. She looked Hank straight in the eyes. “I’m Lydia Callahan. I cannot be defined by a man, even someone as wonderful as you. That would mean my life’s work is meaningless, and after seven years on the run and three in prison, I cannot stand for my life’s work to be meaningless.”
Hank stared back for a full minute. In the silence, the distant mower grew louder as it crossed the rolling lawn, heading toward the main prison block.
Hank blinked first. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I screwed a boy last night.”
Hank said, “I know.”
“You don’t know.” Lydia balled her fists. “All right, you do know, but how?”
“Lydia you have a gift for hiding emotions, but you’ve never been able to hide getting laid.” Hank reached over and touched her hairline at the temple. She flinched. He said, “In here. There’s a tension line that runs through here. When you make love it relaxes for a few hours.” He ran his finger down her temple toward her earlobe. “I know you.”
Lydia’s eyes glistened like oil on a puddle. “It was the first time. Since you.”
“I know that too.”
She slammed a fist on the table. “Christ, I hate it when you say
I know
. You’re so smug you make me barf.”
“I know.”
The last
I know
was Hank’s way of defusing tension, and Lydia almost fell for it, but instead she leaned back, not willing to give him control over the mood. “I just couldn’t see you today knowing I’d never betrayed you. I couldn’t do it.”
“Proving you could sleep with anyone anytime was the only way you could face yourself.”
“It’s more than pride. I had to smash your
fucking face you bastard
.”
The shout shocked them both. Neither knew where that level of anger had sprung from. Lydia’s skin had gone Spearmint gum gray, and her hands shook so badly she hid them in her lap. “Everyone I ever loved was destroyed because of me. I can’t deal with it being random. I have to cause the pain before it comes from outside.”
Although her line of reasoning twisted about and doubled back on itself, Hank was able to follow Lydia perfectly.
“So you had to destroy me on purpose before you destroyed me accidentally.”
“Yes.”
He turned his palms over and spread his hands. “It didn’t work. Look at me.”
Lydia looked at him.
“Do I look destroyed to you?”
Hank looked the same as he had when they sat down, before she dropped her bomb. “Hell, Hank, you’re so good at that wooden Indian face, no one can tell.”
“I can tell, and the way I care for you hasn’t changed.”
“How can that be? I fucked a kid named Warren. He got me off, eventually.”
“We’ve been together thirty years,” Hank said. “Don’t you figure I know who you are and what you are capable of, and more important, what you’re not capable of, by now. You’re God’s own woman, but remorse doesn’t become you.”
“Become?”
Hank nodded. “It’s missing from you like a blind colt missing its sight. The colt can’t comprehend what it would be like to see. When you try faking remorse because you think that’s what a normal person would feel, you get all screwed up inside.”
Lydia started to weep for the first time in Hank’s memory. He was so stunned he almost shut up. But she’d come this far to disillusion his heart, or whatever the hell she thought she was doing. He couldn’t very well stop short.
Hank said, “I love the mountain lion. Does that mean I want to pull the teeth from the mountain lion to make it safer?”
“If you married one, you might.”
“Then it would no longer be a mountain lion. If I demanded—or expected or even dreamed of—normal behavior from you, you would no longer be Lydia.”
Lydia didn’t try to stop the tears. She didn’t touch her face or sniffle or any of the gestures most women make when crying. Maybe she was so new to tears she didn’t know how to use them.
“So you don’t care who I sleep with.”
“Of course I care. But me loving you and you loving me loses every shred of truth if you are confined by duty.”
Lydia thought about this a long time, long enough to cry herself out. Finally, she said, “There’s a really good chance that you’re nuts.”
“Probably.”
Neither of them spoke for ten minutes. Lydia watched the man on the riding lawn mower pull up before a door, get off the mower, and scratching his belly, he went inside. He came back out with a bottle of what, from Lydia’s perspective, looked like Calistoga water, and stood staring at the mower, drinking.
Hank’s eyes were on a pair of hummingbirds fighting over a feeder. Even though the feeder had four fake flowers with holes leading to sugar water, neither hummingbird would allow the other to drink, so they battled like fiends and both went hungry. Hank didn’t see a lick of a life lesson in this. He wasn’t thinking in those terms.
Lydia said, “I’ve lost my power.”
Hank looked from the hummingbird feeder back to Lydia, whose lower lip puffed out like a child who’s been told
No
.
He said, “I don’t think so.”
“No one pays any attention to me anymore. If I scream, they treat me like an elderly eccentric. ‘Oh, that’s just Lydia. Don’t bother about her. She’s harmless.’”
Lydia thought about the Mexican at the gas station the day before. She still couldn’t get over how he’d deflected her charm. He’d behaved as if they had no common ground, as if she were the enemy. Even gay men paid attention when she wanted them to. There wasn’t a man at that table in the Refried Boogie Bar who wouldn’t have gone with her. Why had the gas-station attendant been so mean-spirited?
Lydia said, “I’m hauling around this ninety-nine-year-old geezer. Nobody in their wildest imaginations would ever think he has deep emotions. People
humor
him. I
humor
him. I hear the story of his past, and it doesn’t matter who he loved and hated and lost, because all those people would be dead by now anyway. What does it matter if he lost them at thirty or eighty? They’re gone. It means nothing that the old fart once took up space.”
“He still does.”
“Not space anyone cares about.” Lydia frowned at the thought of Oly Pedersen. It offended her no end that he could stand what he’d become and the way people viewed him. He should be enraged, but he wasn’t. What was all that about?
Lydia’s hands formed into fists, thumbs inside fingers. “That empty bag doesn’t want to die. He’s got no one. He can’t do anything he used to do, and no one who remembers his youth is still alive, but he’s not ready to get out of the way.”
Hank touched her hand, and this time she didn’t flinch. He said, “I can make you a guarantee, Lydia. You will never be harmless.”
Her eyes flashed with a hint of the old flame. “I sure as hell wasn’t harmless last night. I hurt myself but good. It was like self-rape. It was filthy.”
“But you didn’t hurt me.”