Sorrow Floats Read online

  “Clothes, toilet articles, your books.”

  “How about my record albums?”

  “I guess Dothan kept those.”

  I hadn’t expected this, although I should have. I’d been awake two days and Dothan hadn’t come around. Maybe I didn’t expect it because I hadn’t thought about it on purpose.

  “Did he send over my black Tony Lamas?”

  Lydia’s head turned and she blew smoke at me. “You mean the boots with the pint of Yukon in the right toe?”

  We looked at each other a moment. Lydia and I had never messed in each other’s personal moralities before. When I thought I wanted an abortion way back when, she didn’t lay out any version of right or wrong, just offered to pay for it and drive me to the clinic. I didn’t say “Poor Hank” the time she had an affair, or “Give the old man a break” when her dad was laid up by a stroke and she went cold on all of us.

  “Your kidneys will crumple again,” she said.

  I held the sheet hem with both hands. “The jerk is taking my baby from me. Isn’t that reason enough to need a drink?”

  “There will always be a reason.”

  “Just bring me my damn boots.”

  ***

  I didn’t need a drink so much as I needed a drink close by. Jack smelled like a friend, and I took one sip to prove I could, then I screwed his top back on. Comfort isn’t so much drinking whiskey as knowing where the next whiskey will come from.

  ***

  I showered while Lydia fixed lunch. The water was so nice I sat in the tub and let it run over my head till the hot turned tepid. When Lydia brought the cold cheese sandwiches into the bedroom she found me dressed and ready, right down to my black Tony Lama boots.

  She stood in the door with the tray in her hands. Lydia has these unbelievably long fingers. If she’d been born a man, she would have been a surgeon instead of a TV watcher.

  “Going out?” she asked.

  “Do you guys have a tent I could borrow? I need a tent.” I had on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that Sam had given me for one holiday or another.

  “Petey called this morning. He said Annabel hasn’t been told about your escapades—he called them escapades—but you’re welcome to live at home awhile.”

  “That’s nice of him.”

  “You’d have to pretend Dothan’s at a religious retreat.”

  I wondered where I should pretend Auburn was, but it didn’t matter enough to ask.

  Lydia set the tray on the bed and took a bite of my sandwich. “Hank will need help at the ranch this summer. You could live there.”

  “About the tent.”

  “For that matter, you can stay here. Women Against the Bomb can always use another envelope licker.” It’d been Mothers Against the Bomb until Lydia volunteered her way up to director. She changed the name so no one could accuse her of being a mother.

  I talked as I loaded the bare necessities into Sam’s old day pack. Tampons, toothbrush, flashlight, spare panties, pocketknife, notebook, pen, all the candy bars in Lydia’s house, Stuart Little by E. B. White, and the Yukon. “I appreciate all you’ve done, Lydia. I really do, but I need to be near Auburn. He’s my only connection. I’ll be back every day to shower and change.”

  Lydia sat next to the tray and drank my milk. “Doc Petrov didn’t want to release you to me, he wanted you in an institution.”

  “Mental or prison?”

  “He didn’t say. What I mean is, if you behave the least bit strangely out there, Dothan’s going to nail your body to the wall. As it is, you have ninety days without a son. One colorful action and we’re talking lifetime.”

  I thought about what she said, I really did. I just couldn’t differentiate between ninety days and a lifetime.

  “Look, Lydia, what I need most is a postcard. You got any postcards around the house?”

  ***

  Dear Dad,

  I’m sorry I haven’t written in six days. The whole family has been so busy I haven’t had time to think. Auburn has an earache and he’s teething and Dothan picked this of all weeks to go on a religious retreat. I even missed Paul Harvey.

  Be careful, Dad. San Francisco can be weird in the summer. Don’t buy chemicals from people you can’t trust.

  Love,

  Maurey

  6

  The town tone reared its ugly head the moment I walked into Zion’s Own Hardware. Men cut their eyes at me, women whispered. I felt surrounded by a four-foot buffer zone that no one dared enter. All I’d done was drink and mess up; I wondered how big a zone they’d give a person who did something truly awful—Charles Manson or Liz Taylor or somebody. The whole town, buildings and all, would shrink away.

  I picked up three stakes, because Lydia’d said Sam’s backpacking tent was short, some twine, and a canteen and went to the front of the store, where my buffer zone chased off the line at the cash register.

  I placed my purchases on the counter, then slapped Charley down with his barrel pointed at Johnny Jenkins’s belt line.

  “Centerfire, 140 grain, silvertip if you got any, Johnny.”

  He put both hands on the counter. Whenever a salesperson decides they aren’t going to sell you something, be it drugstore, liquor store, or dynamite outlet, they all hit the same pose—both hands flat on the counter, feet slightly spread and evenly balanced. It’s a training thing.

  “I can’t do that, Mrs. Talbot,” Johnny said.

  I played dumb. “Oh, hell, I’ll take hollow point, then.”

  “Dothan telephoned and said not to sell you any bullets or sharp objects.”

  “You always do what my husband says?”

  Johnny kind of sighed. He’s really not such a bad guy, for a Church of Christ deacon. He wasn’t taking pleasure from my humiliation. Lots of people would have taken pleasure. “Mrs. Talbot, can you tell me anything other than tragedy that could come of selling you bullets?”

  A crowd of locals stood outside my buffer zone, watching my life crash like this was an NBC movie of the week.

  “A Hell’s Angel motorcycle gang might rape me and I’d have no protection,” I said.

  Johnny raised up, then down on his toes. “Not likely, Mrs. Talbot.”

  ***

  Johnny Jenkins’s wife, LaWanda, made a pass at me in 1967. She stopped me on the street and asked me to come in her double-wide mobile home for a piece of pineapple upside-down cake. In her kitchen LaWanda told me to read The Feminine Mystique. She took off her blouse and stood there on the linoleum in her green Dacron slacks and bra and asked if I thought she had nice breasts.

  That Fourth of July she ran off with a barrel racer from Aberdeen, South Dakota, and stayed gone three months. Right after LaWanda came home she and Johnny were baptized Church of Christ.

  ***

  I didn’t realize what LaWanda Jenkins did was a pass until two years later at UW, where I met a lesbian-and-proud-of-it. Cynthia said the neat thing about being a gay freshman in the dorms was that she made all the eighteen-year-old Wyoming girls nervous so she didn’t get stuck with a roommate. I liked Cynthia; she’d have been easier to live with than that dork Lucy Jane from Thermopolis.

  I asked Cynthia a series of what must have been the most naive questions in gay history: How can you enjoy it if nothing goes in anything? Does one girl pretend to be the boy and one the girl, and if so, do you switch off roles or is the boy-girl always the boy? Do lesbians have a secret signal they flash so they can recognize each other?

  Cynthia was from San Diego, where she said lesbians abound, so my curiosity must have seemed like Goober gone west. She said in the long run my life would be lots happier if I turned gay, and maybe it would have, but I wasn’t born with the chemicals. I figure it’s as hard to fake you are as it is to fake you aren’t.

  Even though Cynthia had only been nailed by one ma
n—her grandfather—she knew that all men are shits. I had to get nailed by an even dozen to reach the same conclusion. Then I came home and married the biggest shit of the lot.

  7

  I set Sam’s tent up next to my raspberry bushes in the corner of the yard, as far from the front door and walk as I could get and not be on the neighbor’s land. The rain fly didn’t perch right because I was three stakes short on account of Johnny Jenkins’s strict definition of sharp object.

  As I ditched the north end of the tent, Sugar Cannelioski came out the front door and stood on the porch with her hands on her hips. She shouted across the lawn. “What are you doing in my yard?”

  “Your yard?” Sugar had fuzz on her upper lip and no breasts at all, but she compensated with this long blond hair she must have brushed six hundred strokes a day. She stood with her thumbs front and fingers back like city women do the hands-on-the-hips thing. Anyone who’s used to wearing jeans does it the other way around.

  “You heard me, get off my yard before I call Dothan. Scat.”

  I put my hands on my hips the way you’re supposed to. “Come out and make me, you slimy bitch.”

  She didn’t move. “I’m gonna call the police first, then Dothan.”

  I took one step forward and she took one step back. “Does your yard come with my husband and my child?”

  Sugar’s perky face went smug. Nobody liked her; she’d made a career of looking smug at women and stealing men. “Me and Dothan have a trial marriage, and yes, his child is part of it. You’ve messed that baby up but good, Maurey. It might take me weeks to straighten him out.”

  I pulled Charley from my windbreaker and pointed him at her tiny tits. “Bring me my son or I’ll kill you.”

  Sugar laughed. “You got no bullets. Johnny wouldn’t sell you bullets.”

  I pulled the trigger and made a harmless click. To myself I said, “God, I hate this town.” To Sugar I said, “I don’t need bullets to stuff this gun up your ass.” I took three quick steps toward the porch and Sugar scooted back inside.

  ***

  Dothan must have moved fast to bring in a replacement babysitter/whore in less than a week. Or maybe it’d been planned all along. I’d been fairly sure he was nailing Sugar Cannelioski—hell, everyone else who cheated on his wife did. Dothan didn’t have the imagination to nail someone original.

  Sugar had been the town tramp ever since she was sixteen and ran off to Idaho Falls to marry a marine. He got himself killed rolling a Jeep off Teton Pass. People said they were fighting over her morals and Sugar grabbed the wheel. Whatever happened, the boy was killed and Sugar came out with a VA survivors’ pension.

  A year later she seduced and married her sister’s boyfriend. That marriage lasted a month, long enough for her sister to gain forty pounds and the former boyfriend, now husband, to lose his religion and thirty-five percent of all future earnings. Sugar was always bragging how she would never have to work again in her life, nothing to do but concentrate on her appearance. To me, outliving one husband and divorcing another before you’re eighteen isn’t grounds to brag.

  I stretched out on the grass, soaking up sun and waiting for someone to come arrest me. I wondered where Auburn was—in the house or with Dothan or Dothan’s mother or what. Would he be wearing his blue coveralls or the sailor thing or the Alabama Crimson Tide warm-ups? Did he miss me?

  Sugar came back out and sat on the top step to do her nails. Now that the law was on the way, she decided to turn chatty.

  “He’s been waiting to ditch you for years,” she said.

  “We haven’t been married two.”

  “He wanted me, only you’re too worthless to pay alimony or child support. Those are Dothan’s words, not mine, although I will always back up my man. You’re too worthless, so he had to wait for you to provide an excuse so he could dump you without penalty.”

  It occurred to me that the whole time I’d been thinking Sugar was the town tramp, she’d been thinking the same of me.

  Sugar held her left hand out to admire the nail job. “Boy, did you provide an excuse.”

  ***

  The neighbors’ cowdog loped over to mark territory on the tent, and a couple of kindergartner types stood in the street sucking their thumbs and staring at me with blinkless eyes. The little one dragging the blanket shred reminded me of Shannon. I smiled at her and offered a bit of Mars bar, but the other child pulled her away. Curtains fluttered up and down the block, checking out the fallen woman, but no one ventured outside to give me grief. We were all waiting for authority figures.

  Mangum Potter’s sheriff’s department Chevy came from the north just as Dothan’s GMC half-ton appeared from the south. They parked nose to nose with Dothan on the wrong side of the street. As the doors slammed and the two men with power over me made their way across the lawn, I concentrated on the Teton Peaks above their heads. In spring the sky mostly rains or spits sleet and the land goes mud as the snow melts, but on clear days when the valley floor is green and the mountains are white, the whole scenery thing can be uplifting as hell, and I needed uplifting.

  Dothan walked over with his arms folded. He had on a corpse-colored sweater I’d never seen before with the collar points of his shirt neatly placed on the outside like he’d just taken a shower after wholesome exercise. “Jesus,” he said, “she can’t even pitch a tent.”

  Mangum walked to the other side of the tent. “No privy, she must be squatting in the bushes.”

  “I always knew she would wind up crapping in public.”

  “Get away from my camp,” I said. “I’m not breaking any laws.”

  It was like they couldn’t see me, or they didn’t realize I could see them. People talk that way around zoo animals and retarded children.

  “Want me to arrest her?” Mangum asked.

  “What law have I broken?”

  Mangum took the macho thumbs-in-the-belt-loops stance. “We could run her in on public drunkenness.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  Dothan stuck the toe of his boot under a stake and eased it from the ground. My rain fly went even droopier. “In jail where folks can’t see what a wretch she is, they might feel sorry for her.”

  “Nobody feels sorry for her,” Mangum said.

  “I do,” I said.

  Dothan went on. “Let’s keep her out front where she can dig her own grave.”

  Mangum nodded as he considered the wisdom of the plan. “Whatever you say, but I’d be more comfortable with her behind bars.”

  Dothan turned to look at the house. Sugar waved and smiled, and Dothan waved back. “If she approaches my son or my home, I want her nailed to the wall.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Mangum said.

  Dothan always sounds reasonable when he’s not. I started to stand up, but my knees got wobbly. “The part I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you want Auburn. You haven’t spent ten minutes in a row with him since the day he was born.”

  Mangum and Dothan walked toward their vehicles. With his back to me, Mangum said, “What’d you ever see in that woman in the first place?”

  Dothan opened his truck door and looked over at me. The expression on his face was like when you have to shoot a dog that’s been chasing the neighbors’ calves. He said, “I don’t remember.”

  ***

  Dothan saw plenty in me back in high school. He acted half-crazy whenever I came around, although maybe he was at an age where he’d have acted half-crazy about anyone who let him nail her at will. The boy was insatiable—before school, during lunch, he came so quick back then we could hop in a mop closet after geometry, get him off, and not be late for social awareness.

  He was two years older than me, so after he graduated they wouldn’t let him hang around school anymore. He took a job at his dad’s taxidermy. Dothan used to say he spent the days mounting elk and the ni
ghts mounting me. No matter how often he showered the alum brine smell clung to him like Saran Wrap. The stink nauseated me to the point where I refused to kiss him anymore, then he started splashing himself with Old Spice, which was like sucking Sterno.

  My senior year I decided he was more trouble than fun, and I tried to break up. Dothan crumbled. First he said he’d kill me, and when that didn’t draw the right response he said he’d kill himself. He said if I went out with another boy he’d join the army and get sent to Vietnam and die at the hands of gooks and it would be my fault. He also said no one would want me because I had the reputation of a slut. Which was crap; at seventeen every boy wants a slut.

  I finally decided splitting up was just too hard and I’d deal with one more summer before escaping to college. It was a pretty lousy summer. I can’t think of much worse than having sex in a car with someone you don’t like.

  Then, nightmare-come-true, he followed me to Laramie. I’ve never seen such a pain in the butt to get away from. I treated him mean so he would go away—didn’t answer phone calls, stared through him in public, made fun of his pointy chin and old-man hairline.

  To spite Dothan, I went out with an offensive lineman named Rocky Joe and slept with him. Isn’t it amazing the number of motivations there are to fuck? Dothan and Rocky Joe got in a fight, and for the first time in his life, Dothan had his ass kicked. He limped back to GroVont and I never saw Rocky Joe off the football field again.

  After that came the Park thing with all its deepness followed by two years of boys I needed but didn’t much like who didn’t much care for me either. College turned out such a bust that I figured Dothan was what I deserved. He’d gone from stuffing animals to selling real estate—not a step up, but at least he smelled better. So I dropped out, moved back home, got married, got pregnant, got drunk.

  ***

  A kid from the Jackson Hole News dropped by to take my picture as a human-interest item. I crawled in the tent and refused to come out even though he whined that his editor would chew him out if he came back with nothing but a tent in a front yard. I didn’t budge. Nobody says laughingstocks have to cooperate with the media.