Sorrow Floats Read online

  “No.”

  A three-quarter waxing moon came up through the buildings. By moonlight Moby Dick took on a fuzzy glow, as if the white paint had been mixed with Woolite. The ambulance looked more like a loaf-shaped space module than either a whale or an ambulance. I’d about decided to hell with subtle ethical shades, money is money and whiskey is whiskey, and I needed whiskey more than I needed money. My guts felt like I was ovulating a baseball.

  I deserved a drink for letting that sadistic Jesus freak stab me. I deserved a drink because I hadn’t had one yet.

  Shane appeared out of the dark, whistling “Heartbreak Hotel.” He seemed in a good mood. I don’t know why, none of the rest of us were. “Sausage and pineapple, it will be magnificent. They wouldn’t deliver to a parking lot until I personally guaranteed a five-dollar tip.”

  Lloyd’s sad eyes pulled away from Sharon. “How you planning to pay for this sausage-and-pineapple pizza?”

  Maybe black caviar on toast for lunch makes a person happy. Shane’s voice carried a lilt that had been missing since Amarillo.

  “We’ll offer the delivery boy a six-pack. East Coast children go rabid at the sight of Coors.”

  “Did you see Hugo Sr. while you were out there?” Marcella asked. “I’m worried about him.”

  “That husband of yours is the Phantom. You never see the Phantom until he’s least expected, yet he knows your every move,” Shane said.

  “Like Jesus,” Andrew crowed.

  Marcella corrected. “Daddy is not Jesus.”

  Lloyd put Sharon back in his overall’s breast pocket. “I wish you wouldn’t buy things until we’re sure they take beer.”

  “They’ll take beer all right. Trust me.”

  If I’d had a brain, that very moment I would have leapt from Moby Dick and run like the wind for the nearest liquor store. No one you can trust says “Trust me.”

  ***

  The kid who delivered the pizza drove up in a Mazda minitruck with no doors and a red rag stuffed in the gas tank hole. He looked Brad’s age, wore thick horn-rims, both suspenders, and a belt, and he wouldn’t have touched a bottle of Coors for love or money.

  “No beer. That’s nine dollars twenty cents cash, plus the five-dollar tip you promised.”

  Shane held a bottle with one hand on the bottom and the other in back like on “Truth or Consequences” when the girl wanted to showcase a prize. He’d started the bidding with a six-pack and was already up to three cases. “You can market three cases for a hundred and twenty big ones. This is Coors, Rocky Mountain spring water, so rare you can’t buy it in Tennessee for any price.”

  “My boss wants money, not beer. Now cough up fourteen dollars twenty cents or—”

  “Or what, punk?” Shane growled.

  Lloyd came over and lifted the pizza from Shane’s lap. Shane groaned as Lloyd turned and held the box out to the boy. “You’ll have to take it back. Here’s three dollars for your trouble. That’s all I’ve got.”

  The kid didn’t touch either pizza or money. “Listen, mister, no returns. I have to pay for every pizza I take out.”

  I was high-strung enough without this crap. “We don’t have money, peterhead. It’s Coors or take it back. Those are the choices.”

  He blinked really fast. I’ve never seen such a quick blinker in my life. The glasses magnified the blinks so they looked like wings on a hummingbird. “I have one other choice. See that police car down there?”

  We all turned in the direction of the Calhoun Arms, where a white City of Memphis Chevy idled against the curb with a hooker leaning in the window.

  “Officer Hazen is a steady customer of mine. If I tell him a pack of hicks with a trailer full of illegal alcohol stiffed me for a pizza, he’s going to be real angry.”

  “Hicks.” Shane covered his heart with his hand. “The extortionist called us hicks.”

  Lloyd rubbed his forehead and leg at the same time. Looked like Pinocchio in overalls. “Kid, we don’t have money.”

  Blink-blink. “Fourteen twenty or jail.”

  The screw in my lower back drilled through another half inch of spine. I said, “Shit. I knew this would happen. You owe me one, fatso. You owe me about a dozen.”

  Shane wasn’t contrite at all—just grinned and yanked the pizza box out of Lloyd’s hands. He said, “You’ll thank me someday.”

  “Over your dead body.”

  I counted out the nine dollars. “There’s twenty cents here somewhere, let me look in the glove compartment.”

  “And my five-dollar tip.”

  What I wouldn’t give for Charley and one bullet. “You threaten us with jail and now you expect a tip?”

  “The man who called promised a five-dollar tip.”

  “If I had five dollars, I’d stick it up your ass.”

  I needed a drink. The kid was about to cry. All he could get out was a choked “Officer Hazen.”

  Lloyd stepped between us. Lloyd was always stepping between pissed-off people—a regular human buffer zone. “Take this three dollars as a tip. That leaves us without a dime. You should be satisfied with breaking us.”

  Blink-blink. “I was promised five.”

  “You can settle for twelve and leave or cause our arrest and end up with nothing.”

  Shane opened the box. “Balderdash, they left off the pineapple.”

  ***

  Lloyd decided we better hit the road. “That kid’ll get three blocks and come back looking for his cop friend,” he said.

  Marcella gave Andrew a piece, but he wanted a bigger one. “Why would he do such a thing?” she asked. “He already has the money.”

  “Because he’s that kind of person. In his mind we cheated him.”

  Andrew decided the bigger one was too big and the only piece for him was the one Shane was eating. Shane said, “Forget it,” and Andrew started crying, said he wouldn’t eat any, then, and the pizza was stupid.

  Shane offered me a piece, but I wouldn’t touch the damn pizza. I said, “Brad’s got two more hours. You said we could wait.”

  Lloyd’s hand traveled to his breast pocket where Sharon’s picture lay. He patted it the way people who have given up smoking will when they forget they’ve given up smoking. “We can’t handle police questions, Maurey. Brad hasn’t come back all day. Two more hours is too big a risk.”

  To be honest, I had a higher priority than Brad. Alcohol does that. When you need it, other loyalties fly right out the window. “Can we stop at the first liquor store and trade some Coors for a bottle? A half-pint will hold me over.”

  Lloyd didn’t make me beg. I have to give him that much. Never once the whole trip did he make me beg. “Sure,” he said. “We’ll get you a bottle.”

  36

  What makes people fall in love with specific other people? Sam Callahan says it’s a combination of timing and brain waves. Our brain waves snap into place with other random brain waves like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And we fit with an amazing variety of people the same as one jigsaw piece fits with different-shaped pieces depending on which side they lock into. Only the jigsaw metaphor crashes at this point because human brain waves change every so often, so people who click like magic the moment they meet can fall in love, get married, and seven years later be total strangers.

  Sam says the way to deal with romance is to find someone you fit with on the passion level, then try like hell to become friends before the irrational, fluttery-heart stuff wears off.

  Park and I snapped together. When I was with him my stomach trembled, I hyperventilated, and my crotch put out enough lubrication to grease a pickup truck—STP Vagina Treatment. No logical reason existed for basing the worth of my life on this pale, curly-headed, soft-fingered sophomore. He was from the East Coast, didn’t know squat about horses, and, same as Sam Callahan and Lloyd Carbonneau, Park wore his vulnerabi
lity like a shirt. If you ask me, guilelessness for its own sake is a form of guile.

  Probably, if I’d been a virgin when Park and I met, we would be positioning ourselves for a divorce about now—fighting over who gets the Dutch oven and the Remington prints and how much I’m gouging him for child support. We’d have split up over his mother, I bet. Or my alcoholism. In-laws and alcoholism are God’s gift to lawyers.

  You notice I admitted to alcoholism there.

  Breakthrough! Breakthrough!

  First they say it’s a disease, not a character flaw, then they say admitting you have it is half the battle. Admitting you have cancer isn’t half the battle. Or mumps. If this is nothing but a disease, what does the sick person’s stance toward it matter? Huh?

  Alcoholics don’t all expire on the sidewalk in a pool of vomit. Hardly any of them do. Some alcoholics lead rich, full lives surrounded by love and family. Witness Errol Flynn, W. C. Fields, and Calamity Jane. Okay, forget Calamity Jane.

  They can’t take your children simply because you drink through Paul Harvey and masturbate. I could dry out—hide up in the mountains and live off fish and rabbits and huckleberries for the summer while my body detoxed. By reducing all conflict to survival I could sweat out the poison as I grow spiritually and find a private peace.

  If whoever’s in charge let me return to Go, collect my two hundred dollars, and start again, I could control it this time. The bad stuff snuck up on me before; now I’d know the signs of slippage. Given another chance, I would make definite rules for myself—a one-pint limit with no drinking before Auburn went to bed at night. Who could ask for more than that?

  There on Highway 64, rolling through the darkness of Tennessee, sipping discreetly on my half-pint of George Dickel, I made a pact with God: Give me back Auburn and I’ll never touch alcohol while he’s awake. I will stay in control. What a deal. I get what I want—my baby and a relationship with Yukon Jack—and God gets what he wants—a good mom.

  The moon illuminated a countryside littered by countless varieties of trees and houses that glowed silver behind long front porches and open windows with no curtains. I could see the rooms the people lived in, the couches and flickering television sets. As Moby Dick wallowed east the dash lights threw a shadow from Lloyd’s upper lip across his nose. When he blinked the spider lines around his eyes glittered.

  I felt good about admitting to alcoholism and making the covenant with God, and I almost told Lloyd, but the nice feeling was too precarious. Lloyd might scoff. He might say “I used to make deals with God,” as if everything I tried to cope with the situation was old hat.

  Reformed people are such a pain. “I did it, so you can.” How the hell do they know that? I can stand up on a galloping horse; Lloyd can’t. I can make a baby; Lloyd can’t. Personal capabilities are highly individualistic. Lloyd was weak and couldn’t control himself, so he assumed I couldn’t control myself, either. With him, drinking had to be all or nothing. But I wasn’t Lloyd; I was capable of compromise.

  ***

  Dad used to say I was stubborn as a hare-lipped mule—one of those nifty yet basically meaningless phrases he learned from his father, who learned it from his father, and so on back into the Middle Ages. Ever notice how the stupid stuff is passed on but the valuable lessons must be relearned by each generation?

  Anyhow, every Pierce family reunion Dad told this story about how he gave me a Red Ryder BB rifle for my fifth Christmas. Wyoming’s one of those places where it’s considered normal for Santa Claus to bring guns to little girls. I was riding horses solo at four. I guess Dad figured I might as well be shooting animals at five.

  An hour after I unwrapped gifts I was pow-powing at Petey, and Dad told me always take for granted the weapon is loaded.

  I said, “It’s not loaded.”

  Dad said, “That doesn’t matter. Always pretend it is, and never point it at a person.”

  I said, “I’ll point it at Petey if I want to.”

  Same conversation you read in the newspaper next to a photo of a redneck with his head blown apart. In my case, Dad took the gun away and I ran to my room and wailed all morning, screaming angry denunciations of all my presents, my parents, and Christmas itself. Bad as Andrew.

  Finally Dad decided I’d learned my lesson and gave back my rifle. I said, “Any numbskull knows this gun’s not loaded,” and fired a round through Mom’s beehive hairdo into an angel ornament atop the Christmas tree.

  That’s the last I saw of my Red Ryder rifle. Looking back, it seems fate that any girl who rides at four and shoots (once, anyway) at five will get pregnant at thirteen. Thirteen is the age when Mom and I stopped laughing when Dad came to the part of the story where he said, “That’s the day Maurey nailed her mother and an angel with a single bullet.”

  ***

  I woke up in a campground beside a dull silver river somewhere in Tennessee. The campground was deserted except for a pickup camper next to us and a station wagon surrounded by five Boy Scout tents. Birds chirped like mad, and down by the river a raccoon waddled along a trail, stopping now and then to sniff the air.

  Lloyd was asleep with his head back and his hands on the steering wheel. Shane’s rumble was louder than ever; his sleeping lungs had taken on the grunt of a bugling elk. If I told people around here Shane sounded like a bugling elk, they would say “Huh?” I missed Wyoming. I missed my own bed and my fuzzy blue bathrobe and the window seat where I could look out at the mountains. If anything, Tennessee had more trees than Arkansas. Made me claustrophobic.

  The camper door opened and a large, hairy man came out, stretched, and made chew motions with his mouth. He had on slacks but no shirt or shoes. He faced the horse trailer, unzipped himself, and started peeing—didn’t bother checking to see if anyone else was awake and watching.

  “You’d think he would cover himself,” Lloyd said.

  “You awake?”

  “I don’t care where he is, a man should shield himself when he urinates.”

  “Dad said a man should be able to leak off his porch in the morning without shame.”

  “There’s a difference between without shame and showing off.”

  The hairy man went an awful long time—sounded like a horse going on gravel. With his free hand he rubbed the hair on his chest, then scratched his beard. Only after shaking his thing twice and zipping it back up did he look around and see me. There was no sign of embarrassment, even though he must have known I’d watched. He stared at me a long time, almost as long as he’d peed, then he went back to the camper. He opened the door, but before climbing inside he stooped to throw a rock at the raccoon. Missed by two feet.

  “Rude fella,” Lloyd said.

  The truck was an off yellow with Tennessee plates and half-bald tires. “Seemed okay to me.”

  “Well, look at that,” Lloyd said.

  Hugo Sr.’s Oldsmobile pulled off the highway and stopped fifty yards or so downstream. Brad got out the passenger side.

  I whooped and jumped out the door. I don’t know why I was so glad to see the kid, it’s not like we went way back or anything. It’s just that I felt responsible, what with helping him escape Freedom and cutting his hair and all. Losing him was a minor form of losing Auburn and Shannon.

  Brad waved so long to Hugo Sr. and walked toward us carrying a brown paper sack. You could tell he was happy to be home. Moby Dick’s side blew open and Andrew flew out. He ran down to Brad, yelling, “The grown-ups ditched you. I told them I’d break windows if they did, but after pizza they ditched you anyway. They never listen to me.”

  Everyone’s reaction was way overblown, considering we hardly knew each other. Shane grinned and bobbed, Lloyd waved a thank-you to Hugo Sr., Marcella straightened a place in the junk pile for Brad to sit.

  He’d sold his hair. Walked way out in the suburbs to a wig joint and sold the sunshine-colored mane. The sack was f
ull of presents—spark plug wires for Lloyd, Oreos for Shane, a stack of Marvel comics for Andrew, and a box of pink bubble bath for Marcella.

  Marcella was amazed. “No one ever gave me toiletries before. Every year I ask, but Hugo Sr. gets me scissors or Tupperware or something he thinks I need. How’d you find him?”

  “He was sitting in the parking lot. Said he knew y’all had left without me, so he waited.” Brad turned to Marcella. “He feels real bad about Annette Gilliam.”

  Marcella’s hands did a nervous twisting thing. “You’re good with men, Maurey. What should I do?”

  I’m good with men? “Let him feel bad. We all feel bad—why should Hugo be different?”

  Brad dug into the bottom of the bag and came up with a fifth of Yukon Jack. “Is this your brand?”

  I could have kissed the boy. Instead, I kissed the bottle.

  ***

  Dear Dad,

  People are trying to make me want things I swore off and swear off things I want, i.e. family and whiskey. I expressed enthusiasm this morning and afterwards floundered in guilt that I can feel joy without Auburn. What kind of mother am I? What kind of father were you? How should I behave?

  Get your ass back here,

  Your daughter

  ***

  As morning wore on, I found myself free-falling into depression. For one thing, I’d missed Paul Harvey. And for the other thing, I was irritated with Moby Dick’s little gang of lost souls. Didn’t they know we were almost to the destination? What then? I’d go on to Greensboro to find Sam Callahan and Shannon, Lloyd was off to Florida searching for the holy grail or whatever, Lord knows what would happen to Brad. I’d lost everyone I ever cared for, and now, after this bunch tricked me into liking them, it was fixing to happen again. As always, nobody gave a flying hoot. They all acted as if we were driving to the moon and back. I was tempted to find a bus stop and bail out.

  “Most people are unaware that Hank Williams had leukemia when he passed away,” Shane said. “A doctor in Mobile prescribed heroin to kill the pain, and Hank overdosed, thus making him the first superstar, white superstar, anyway, to die of drugs.”