Lydia (6 page)

“What do you think?” she asked. “Would it look pretty next to my hair?”

I said, “Has anyone seen my folks?”

“I imagine they’re blown up with the hotel. What’s your name?”

She had freckles and tiny teeth. Eighty-seven years later, I still can call up a picture of those tiny teeth.

I said, “I don’t recall.”

She laughed like this was queer, which I guess it was, for a person not to know their own name, but I took offense anyway. I said, “You fly through the air and land on your head and leg and see how much you remember.”

She said, “I wouldn’t forget my own name,” and I said, “Which is?” That’s when she told me: “Agatha Ann Cox.”

“Is this your family’s house?”

“All except Bill, he went south to be a cowboy.”

I wondered if I was supposed to know who Bill was. When a person is incoherent, they can be told things that later they don’t recall.

Real solemn-like, she said, “My father is Mr. Cox.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and talk hurt my head, so I didn’t give a rejoinder.

She went on anyhow. “Mr. Cox owns the bank downtown. He takes care of the money.”

“You think he might give me some?”

She screwed her mouth up like she was considering the proposition. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll ask him. There might be a thousand or so laying around with nobody’s name to it.”

I said, “I’d appreciate that.”

***

Mr. Cox found Dad at the Saint Vincent Hospital where the Sisters of Charity had taken Mom and the others. Three or so bodies had been scorched to the condition you couldn’t recognize who they’d been, and Dad thought one of these was me, so when Mr. Cox told him of my whereabouts, Dad was greatly relieved. I heard later he cried and made a scene to the point where the other bereaved were not comfortable.

They brought Dad to the Coxes’, where I was sitting up on the divan eating breakfast with Agatha and Mrs. Cox. It was only oatmeal. There wasn’t coffee on account of the Coxes being Anabaptists. Dad’s pupils were tiny pushpin prick holes, and his fingers trembled when he hugged me. I would normally be made sheepish to have him hug me in front of the Cox women, but this time I didn’t mind much. After all, Mom was dead, and he’d thought I was along with her.

He said, “Your mama didn’t suffer.” I don’t know how he knew this. Or even why it mattered so much to him. She was dead either way. A big lead mirror frame had fallen across her and broke her neck in half. He said, “She never even woke up.”

I said, “That’s for the best,” because I knew he wanted me to say so.

I felt real bad about Mom being dead and all, but more for me than her. She was too scared of life to enjoy it. When you wake up each day fully expecting to be killed, the coming to pass finally is a relief.

While we talked, the doctor appeared on the Coxes’ front porch. Billings had three regular doctors, a female doctor, and a Chinese fella did medicine with needles. Dr. Harriet Clarke, the female, had eyebrows you could clean a chimney with. She’d been awake since the explosion the morning before and had performed several amputations since breakfast, so she didn’t waste no bedside sympathy on a boy with a broke leg.

She set it quick. There was a flash of white pain, then I was okay. For my concussion she rubbed my skull with a liniment made from ammonia, prairie-chicken eggs, and a pair of secret ingredients. It was white, kind of like milk of magnesia, and smelled of sulfur. Whatever the secret ingredients were must of done the trick, because my head pain fled and I could see normal again.

Before Dr. Harriet took her leave, she said to Dad, “You’d better lay off the stuff.”

Dad said, “I lost my wife Portia,” and Dr. Harriet answered with, “That’s reason enough today, but this boy will need tending tomorrow.”

I did not know then, but the cause for Dad’s pupils being pushpin prick holes was opium. To this day, I suspect he’d discovered opium in San Francisco, which is why he knew so much about Chinatown and the Chinese ways. Whenever he started doesn’t matter so much. The truth is, my father became an addict, just as bad as any in a magazine. I think the grief drove him so he didn’t want to feel or think straight ever again. That was his choice. I do not wish to speak poorly of my dad, but, so far as living goes, his life ended with Mama’s.

In that deep, dark place that Mary Beth alternately thought of as her guts or her heart, she never truly believed Leroy was dead. Everyone from the days when she’d been with him said he was dead. A man named Dolf told her he saw Leroy’s body, riddled with bullets, every bone in his right hand broken. Dolf said the Colombian cartel threw Freedom into a village well, in hopes the rotting decay would make the peasants sick.

“If he was so riddled with bullets, how could you tell it was him?” Mary Beth asked.

“The tattoo on his chest. Only one man in the world has that tattoo.”

Mary Beth nodded her agreement, but in her dark place, she knew better. Some people don’t die. Like Elvis or Jesus. Or more like Butch Cassidy. Exactly like Butch Cassidy, because they both of them went to South America to get killed—or not killed—when it could just as easily have happened at home.

Over the years, she moved from Boulder to Telluride and on to Houston. In Houston, she married Lonnie Bath. They moved to Santa Fe, where Jazmine was born, followed eighteen months later by Meadow. Mary Beth found a good job as a chiropractor’s receptionist; Lonnie went into construction. And every day of the journey, she expected Leroy to walk through the door and claim her as his own. She didn’t speak of him to anyone, not even Lonnie, and the few friends she kept up with from the freak days didn’t say a word about the possibility, but Mary Beth knew—her happiness was an illusion. It was temporary.

She refused to buy more than one roll of toilet paper at a time, and her family made do with the travel-sized tube of toothpaste. She never subscribed to a magazine, always paid full newsstand prices. Mary Beth knew better than to tempt God. She knew that if she took the future for granted, Leroy would rise from the dead and bite her.

And then, one day, he did.

She was driving home from the Suds’n’Duds Laundromat, where she’d washed eight loads, an entire week’s worth of clothes in a single organized attack involving almost one hundred quarters. Meadow was strapped in the back, sleeping, Jazmine sat in the front seat next to Mary Beth, jabbering about a boy at her day care who could eat Play-Doh.

“It turns his poop blue,” Jazmine said.

“If your poop came out blue, I’d rush you to the emergency room and have you irrigated,” Mary Beth said.

“What’s irrigated feel like?”

“You won’t like it.”

And there he was, leaning against a stoplight with his hands in his pockets, his back slouched as if he had no intention of crossing the street, even if the light did change. He’d lost weight, his head had been shaved in the last couple of months—when Mary Beth knew him he’d had hippie hair—his face had more pockmarks, and his nose had obviously been broken since she had last seen him, but Mary Beth didn’t have a doubt. It was Leroy.

She instinctively ducked an inch, but it was too late. He’d seen her the moment she saw him. Their eyes locked as Mary Beth’s car glided through the intersection. Leroy didn’t move; his face gave no sign that he recognized her.

“Mom!”

“What?”

Mary Beth saw the bread truck a moment before it was too late. She swerved hard right and hit a parking meter. Both girls broke into loud tears. A man ran from a computer store toward her car. Steam hissed from under the hood. Mary Beth twisted in her seat and looked back at the intersection, but Leroy had disappeared, as if he’d never been there. But he had been there. It was Leroy, and he wasn’t dead.

“Roger, you must know more third-trimester positions than anyone else on the planet,” Eden Rae O’Connor said to Roger Talbot.

“I’ve never been with a girl who wasn’t pregnant.”

“You should write a book.”

At the moment, Eden’s third-trimester position involved a buck-and-rail fence and two pails. Roger stood behind Eden, counting the various tints of pink in the sunset as five Canada geese flew in single wing formation from the ridge behind Grizzly Lake. Snow on the Sleeping Indian gave off a nice watermelon glow, more from within than any reflection of sunlight. The Sonny Rollins soundtrack to the movie
Alfie
played in Roger’s head—fourth track, the tune where Kenny Burrell lays down the guitar equivalent of a waterfall.

“Oh my
God
,” Eden squealed. “Just as I gazzed, the baby jumped up and kicked.”

“Are you sure you know what an orgasm is? Nobody comes that quick.”

“Back up. I think the baby is trying to tell me something.”

“But I haven’t squirted yet.”

Eden stepped off the pails and lowered her skirt. “Don’t be selfish, Roger. The baby is more important than your off.”

“Wasn’t more important than yours.”

Eden turned and sat on the middle rail of the fence, with her forearms propped across her great belly. “We’ll bonk again in a minute. Maybe it’ll make me go into labor.”

Roger pulled his jeans up from his packer boots and tried to button his fly, but it wasn’t comfortable. “You want to go into labor this early?”

“I love you dearly, Roger, but all I want right now is to have this baby, give it away, and go home to Pasadena.”

Later on, as they walked across the west pasture back toward Roger’s cabin, she entwined her fingers in his free hand. Roger liked this. He wasn’t used to much display of affection after the fact.

Eden said, “You know when we’re doing it, do you feel any emotions?”

Roger considered the question. “Do you want me to?”

“I was just wondering what you feel while we’re scrogging.”

“I felt peaceful back there. The sky was a pretty color, and you’re easy to be with. So I would say I felt comfortable.”

“That’s nice. I’d rather you be comfortable than any of that other emotional gunk boys talk about after they get off.” They walked on across the sagebrush. Eden held her belly with her left hand and Roger with her right. “Honor told me that when you first came here, you couldn’t talk.”

An owl hooted down by the river. Roger thought it was a female barn owl, but he wasn’t sure. Owls had never been his strong suit.

“Is that true?” Eden asked.

Roger pulled his tie-dyed bandanna low over his eyebrows. It gave him the look of a Grateful Dead roadie. “I wish Honor was the one who can’t talk.”

“Was it you couldn’t, or you wouldn’t?”

“Didn’t seem much difference, at the time.”

“Why did you stop talking?”

Roger thought before he answered. He liked Eden and didn’t want to fall back on the quick, smart-aleck answers he usually gave such questions. “As I understand the deep mental crap, if I knew why I quit, I wouldn’t have quit.”

“How long did you go without talking?”

He shrugged.

“You can’t remember?”

“Nope. Don’t want to either.”

She stopped and looked at him. Most late-pregnancy teenagers can’t see beyond their own bodies. Roger had the feeling that six months after they went home, not one in ten even remembered what he looked like. But now, in the soft evening alpenglow, Eden was staring right at him. “I’ll bet you had something God-awful terrible happen in your past, made you forget and stop talking.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Roger walked on, immediately regretting his words. I once told him that being flippant is how men sidestep intimacy. If Roger had a tragic flaw, it was his innate talent for sidestepping intimacy. He had recently promised me he would never answer a sincere woman’s question glibly, yet here, the first test out, he’d failed. God knows with girls sincerity is hard, but you’ve got to try.

Eden hurried to catch up. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.”

“How could you not think about it?”

“There’s a reason people forget terrible things. If everybody remembered every detail about their past, the whole world would go insane.”

“But what if you’re Princess Di’s illegitimate son, given up at birth the way I’m giving up my baby? Or you’re the next Dalai Lama?”

“If I was the next Dalai Lama some monk from Tibet would drive up the river and tell me.”

“I know!” Eden’s face lit up like the watermelon snow on the Sleeping Indian. “You witnessed a grisly murder, and the murderer is someone famous who’s been on TV, and unless you remember, he’ll get away scot-free. Only he knows you know, and when you remember, his goose will be cooked, so he’s hired a band of private detectives to search the countryside, and when they find you, he’ll slit your throat.”

Roger smiled, which wasn’t something he did on a regular basis. “Your story makes as much sense as any of the others I’ve dreamed up.”

“Why did you start talking again?”

“Don’t know that either.” Roger stopped to hang the pails on the side of the snowmobile shed. “Yes, I do. At supper one night, I wanted cornbread, and Auburn was whining about hockey or something, and Maurey wasn’t paying any attention, so I thought to myself, this pointing-and-signing stuff is stupid.

“Is that when you started talking?”

“I said, ‘Please pass the fucking cornbread.’”

Eden’s right hand went to her mouth. “What’d your family do?”

“They passed the fucking cornbread.”

***

Roger and I had spent a lot of time together recently, discussing what life means and which parts matter and which don’t. I firmly believe lying to women is the same as lying to God—or the Great Whatever. I believed that then, and I still do. If this is true, Roger was lying to God when he told Eden he never thought about what had made him stop talking. Some days he didn’t think about it so much, but other times it was practically all he thought about.

Somewhere back in his childhood, he had been royally gypped—screwed out of eleven or twelve years of memories. He’d read enough books and seen enough movies to know you don’t simply lose those years; they exist somewhere, sealed in by scar tissue. But repressed-memory retrieval scared the beJesus out of Roger. He’d researched it. He knew when people did remember lost childhoods, the memories could not be trusted. These days thousands of wanna-be victims were clearly recalling horrible Satanic cults and baby sex-abuse experiences that hadn’t happened at all but were remembered anyway. What was the point of remembering unless you knew for certain the memory was true?

Not remembering held its own anxieties. On Maurey and Pud’s satellite television, he saw a movie called
Sybil.
It starred Sally Field as a girl with seventeen or eighteen personalities, and some of them didn’t like each other. The real Sybil would disappear for long periods of time while other girls with names like Erica or Judy lived in her body. For months after he saw the movie, Roger walked around expecting to turn into someone else. He imagined a jock named Bubba Joe would take over his body. Bubba Joe hated Roger and would try to kick him out of himself. Roger had trouble relaxing.

Then, last winter, the dreams began. They weren’t specific dreams; he wasn’t tied to the piano till he peed his pants the way Sally Field was. They were feelings dreams. Dreams where he was terrified and trapped. Great weights on his third-eye dreams. Or the rush of a roller-coaster drop. Flying a thousand miles an hour through space with no one to hold him.

By Easter, there was a man in his dream. A true villain with bad teeth, cracked lips, and a smell of rubbing alcohol. The man didn’t do anything; he just stood too close. Roger knew not to move when the man looked at him. He knew the pain was real. Roger woke up from the man dreams quivering, soaked in sweat, blood gushing from his nostrils like his brain had been skewered.

Smells triggered the dream feeling, even when he was awake. A blown-out match gave him a Freon feeling in his spine and stomach. Intense and terrific sadness. A dry well on the steam table at Dot’s Dine Out sent him into two days of spinning suicidal remorse. Suicide was the concrete fear. He was afraid he wasn’t the one in control of the question; that Bubba Joe or the dream man might make him do things he didn’t want to do. He was afraid if he remembered, he might go back to wherever he had come from.

***

I know all this because he talked to me about it. “Do you think it’s possible that a person can lose control over what they do?” Roger asked.

I tried to come up with the answer least likely to screw him up, and couldn’t, so I fell back on the truth. “I suppose so. Last summer, I lost my temper and rammed a pickup truck that went straight from a left-turn-only lane.”

“I mean more along the lines of having an alien take control of your body.”

One thing you have to give me is I always take whatever people say seriously. Others ignore the bizarre statement. Not me. “Like that guy in New York who said his dog made him murder random strangers?”

“The Son of Sam.”

“You can’t blame me for that one.”

“I’m wondering if irresistible acts are truly irresistible.”

I nodded. “You’re talking suicide.”

Roger pulled his bandanna down over his eyebrows.

I said, “A clinically depressed person might think he has no choice in the matter, but he does.”

“I’m thinking of the shattered personality.”

“You saw
Three Faces of Eve
.”

“
Sybil.
”

We were drinking brandy and coffee in Roger’s cabin. I came up whenever the pressure of living with a pack of females got to be too much. About once a day.

I said, “You’re afraid you might kill yourself?”

Roger crossed the room to put another stick in the woodstove. “I worry about psychological clutter
making me do stuff I don’t want to do.”

“I could ask Shannon. She studied this in college.”

“Don’t ask Shannon.”

“She had a job at a mental hospital once. Nurse’s aide to the catatonics.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about me to Shannon.”

“I’d think you’d want expert advice if you’re really worried about losing control of yourself.”

“Nurse’s aide to catatonics doesn’t make Shannon an expert on suicide.”

***

On account of the not-talking thing and general spookiness, Maurey kept Roger out at the ranch his first year in Wyoming, so when he finally started GroVont Middle School he was older than the other kids in his class. He followed a year behind Auburn at Jackson Hole High. They rarely spoke to each other at school. Auburn was popular with the football and hockey crowd, while Roger kept to himself. Roger knew he embarrassed Auburn, and at first he enjoyed causing embarrassment, but soon the thrill wore off. Auburn’s senior year, the boys treated each other like the Hong Kong flu.

Auburn graduated and went on to the university at Laramie. Roger graduated and went back up the river. He wasn’t ready to take on the wide world quite yet, but he was also sick of feeding horses at 5 a.m. in below-zero weather. The only nonranch work on the upper Gros Ventre River was my Virgin Birth Home for Unwed Mothers at what had been the Bar Double R, a mile and a half upstream from the TM.

I had been bungling along, doing my own maintenance, and it was only dumb luck I hadn’t burned the place down. Gilia wasn’t any better. While she was brilliant when it came to decorating the lodge, if the generator went down, she was no more competent than me or the pregnant girls. Roger spent his post-graduation summer building himself a one-room cabin a couple hundred yards up the creek from the unwed mothers’ compound and moved in.

He liked it there, alone, with his jazz CDs, his woodstove, and my books. It was the ideal situation for a kid who wanted to avoid pavement.

Roger soon discovered his job came with perks. Virgin Birth housed from two to maybe six pregnant girls at a time. Some had babies, and some had abortions. A girl leaning toward an abortion was not roomed with a girl leaning toward having the baby. It might cause sadness. Most of the girls were sad, anyway, and some were flat miserable. Some cried for six months, until Roger thought the baby would grow up split, like Sybil. A few of the girls—at least one in each batch—had led creative, active sex lives before pregnancy and were in no rush to give it up. Since I practice monogamy with Gilia—we should stress that fact—by default, Roger became alpha male of the compound.

It started less than a month after Roger moved upriver. He’d been working on the kitchen-stove vents all afternoon, and in the evening, he took a shower in the main house, then walked to his cabin and built a fire in the woodstove. Brother Jack McDuff wailed on the CD player. Pud had given Roger a left-handed Orfeus bass guitar for a graduation present. He’d set up a music stand to hold his book so he could pluck his bass and read at the same time. He was reading a novel he’d borrowed from me called
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy. I collect books and have a huge library, but I haven’t read 10 percent of the books I own. I want them there on the shelves in case the road avalanches and I’m stuck at home for two decades. Roger read more of my books than I did. Fresh out of high school, Roger’s ambition in life was to sit by the stove, playing jazz bass lines and reading.

The Moviegoer
was quite a good book, and Roger was as at peace as Roger ever got, when his door opened and Coffee Kennedy slipped in.

She said, “We need to talk.”

Roger said, “What about?”

Coffee was from New Mexico and pregnant with her second child. Her mother was raising the first, with no intention of taking on number two, so Coffee had been shipped to the Home. Coffee’s problem was she loved sex more than responsibility. Some people do. When Coffee slipped through Roger’s door, she was a woman on a mission.

The second girl didn’t even want copulation. Amelia said, “I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in a week.”