Sorrow Floats (2 page)

Delilah Talbot’s feet hung over both sides of her sandals like oozing Silly Putty. She stood next to the television in her polyester slacks and matching jacket outfit, looking with distaste at Auburn on the floor.

She said, “Greens.”

Once you rose above the feet, the rest of Delilah wasn’t fat at all. In fact, from the knees up she looked kind of depleted. “Green what?”

Auburn’s face took me in, and he crawled under the kitchen table where he turned around and stared through the legs of a chair. My nose said he needed changing.

Delilah expanded her first statement. “In Alabama we had green vegetables with every meal, but out west it’s meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes. Manners are a by-product of green vegetables. That’s why westerners don’t have any.”

She stood with one finger on her chin, watching me load up his diaper bag, blanket, the stuffed Cowardly Lion, and a sponge cake she’d baked for Dothan. She made no move to help me chase down my child.

Instead, the woman gazed into the air near my ear and said, “Manners.” Often Mrs. Talbot stripped the front half and back half out of sentences, leaving one word to fend for itself.

I shrugged the load onto my shoulders. “You mind handing me Auburn?”

“Are you feeding my son green vegetables? I don’t mean iceberg lettuce. Iceberg lettuce is not a green vegetable.”

I bent on one knee to look under the table, hit my forehead on the metal strip that held the linoleum in place, and dropped the diaper bag.

Mrs. Talbot didn’t notice. “Dothan was rude when he dropped Aubie off this morning; I suspect you of not serving green vegetables.”

Auburn smiled and put some floor gunk in his mouth. I reached a finger in and dug out a dried piece of elbow macaroni.

“I still don’t understand why you cut your hair, Maurey. You were so pretty as a little girl.”

One thing about Delilah, she didn’t see anything she didn’t want to see. I could show up at her house toilet-hugging smashed and she’d say, “What a nice shirt. Did someone give it to you?” Right now she had no idea I was getting the whirlies under her kitchen table.

She said, “Lord Byron.”

I reached one hand around Auburn’s waist, and he frowned. If I moved too fast there’d be a scream scene, which had to be avoided at all costs. Scream scenes drove me to drink.

I truly enjoy being a mother, only I’m not naturally suited to motherhood. I love Auburn and couldn’t live without him; it’s the motherhood itself—the smells, the lack of sleep, the humiliation. I’m not one of those women born to nurture.

Mrs. Talbot droned on about Byron—Byron’s foot, Byron’s legacy, Byron’s death.

I said, “I heard Byron slept around.”

“I can’t gab all the livelong day. Toodles.” The door slammed, and after a moment, I heard Mrs. Talbot’s El Camino pulling out of the drive.

“Thank God,” I said to Auburn.

He put three fingers in his mouth.

I lowered my cheek to the tile to look up at him through one eye. Auburn had Dad’s forehead and my blue eyes and skinny fingers. I couldn’t see any Dothan in my baby. I liked to pretend Dothan wasn’t related to him. Maybe Auburn’s father had been Frostbite’s spirit or God or Yukon Jack. This beautiful person couldn’t be connected to a man who sold real estate or a woman with fat feet who said “Toodles.”

I lifted my head off the tile and crossed my eyes and cooed, “
Boo boo be doop
,” in my Betty Boop voice.

Auburn laughed.

I did Olive Oyl. “Oh, Popeye, you’re such a man.”

And Wimpy. “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

I would have tried any trick to make Auburn laugh because one smile from my baby was worth whatever other trouble my ridiculous life dished out. When he squeezed my nose I went into W. C. Fields. “Sure, I like children, I like them with whiskey for lunch. Speaking of whiskey…”

Leaving Auburn under the table, I back-crawled out, then front-crawled over to Garth Talbot’s fake-maple liquor cabinet. I didn’t drink his liquor—at least not much. I poured a single shot of ouzo but left it on the floor. What I did was I mixed. I mixed Scotch with Jack Daniel’s and Jack Daniel’s with Scotch, then gin with vodka and vodka with gin. Everything color-coded.

Auburn looked on solemnly.

“Garth will never notice,” I said. Auburn took his fingers out of his mouth and crawled over to my lap. I held him with one hand and mixed with the other. One of my biggest fears, besides quitting Yukon Jack, was that Auburn would grow up to become a Talbot; that he’d obsess on TV football and South-shall-rise-again. Worse yet, he might grow into the Talbot chin. The Talbot men have this sharp, jutty chin you could plow with. According to Sam Callahan, every night at sunset all Talbot chins point to Alabama.

Sam Callahan is Shannon’s father and my best friend. My only friend. We were never lovers except in the loosest definition. At thirteen, Sam and I lost our virginities together. We would play Red Rover, Red Rover and Red Light, Green Light, then go inside and play sex—Sam gave me killer orgasms back then—then go back outside and play Kick the Can. It was like Paul Harvey on canning jars, cantaloupe, and Watergate—none of the games meant any more or less than the others. Our lost virginities had nothing to do with lost innocence, at least until I landed pregnant.

Sam had all the maternal instincts I lacked. After the birth, I went back to cheerleading practice, cutout magazine photos of Sal Mineo, and Coke dates, and Sam went on to changing diapers and two o’clock feedings. He always volunteered to baby-sit, then to keep Shannon for the weekend, then the week. Pretty soon she was with him and Lydia all the time, and I’d washed out as a mom. Hell, I still hadn’t had a period yet, how was I supposed to have instincts?

Sam did. He was born to mother. Sometimes I wish I’d fallen for him on a nonbuddy level, but you can’t fake that stuff. He was too considerate to get the hots for.

You know how whenever boys squirt, first thing afterward when you’re feeling warmish and post-passion affectionate, they jump up and bolt to the bathroom? They go off and pee like horses and come back to bed with one urine drop hanging off the end. That’s when the boy feels like cuddling, but he hops under the sheets and pulls you close and that wet piss-head pokes right in your thigh. Talk about killing romanticism. That’s when I go home.

Well, at thirteen, Sam always toilet paper-blotted the end dry before he came back to bed so that wouldn’t happen. Who taught him that kind of consideration? The kid was weird.

As I changed Auburn he gurgled and made little fists with his hands. I put my face in his and he pulled my ears. I blew on his belly and he laughed like an angel. He had the teeniest penis. I couldn’t conceive of it growing up and getting hard and being used as a weapon against women. Or maybe I could since that’s what I thought about.

“You better not act like a man,” I said. Auburn burped.

Since Mrs. Talbot hadn’t bothered to change him, I left the stinky diaper in the trash sack under her sink. The smell would remind her of what she didn’t do.

Thinking of Sam brought back a certain warmness that I usually kept covered with Yukon Jack. Sam drinks ouzo. I chugged my glass and left it on the floor while I regathered the pile of stuff. I stood up too fast, and the room separated itself from me. Took a moment for the black spots to settle out. Auburn sat on one hip, balancing the pile of mother stuff on the other side. At the front door, I turned to look for lost squeeze toys and saw Dothan’s cake on the table. To hell with it.

The deal is that Sam was, and is, just a pal, but those carefree young lays were technically the most dynamite sex I’ve ever had. Sam paid attention. And he was easy to boss around. I could say higher, lower, harder, no-you-can’t-stop-now; give directions you can’t give a lover. God, did that boy have a golden tongue. I bet he’s popular down there in North Carolina.

I’d never gotten off, not once, with Dothan, and he never went down. Why did you marry the bum, you asked? I take a drink and change the subject.

The spring before I dropped out twelve credits short of graduation and came home to marry Dothan, my boyfriend was named Leon. Leon the Moron. I tried for weeks to get him down there, then when he finally went, he dropped way too low, all the way to the hole, and he like chewed as if I were gum or something. He lasted about ninety seconds before he whined, “Did you get off yet?” I said yes just to move him off my crotch. Leon couldn’t find a clitoris with a map. Then, he jumped up like they all do and headed for the can. Only instead of peeing, Leon brushed his teeth. I caught him. Chewed me for a minute and a half, then practically ran for his toothbrush.

At the Bronco the diaper bag strap broke and stuff fell all over the curb. Clean diapers, dirty diapers, a plastic Indian,
The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Auburn’s pacifier—a jar of Gerber strained fruit cocktail hit the concrete and broke. When I leaned over, Charley came out of my pocket and bounced under the car.

Auburn laughed. I put him and his blanket on the roof and dropped to my knees to reach under for Charley. I leaned my left hand on a can opener.

“Shit. Why me? Everything happens to me.”

I found my Ortho-Novum pill wheel, which I’d lost during the green tablet section. Greens were blanks and peach pills stopped whatever had to be stopped so I wouldn’t get pregnant again. The pill companies thought women were such idiots they had to take blanks because they couldn’t be trusted to count to seven. I was three days late starting peach, not because I couldn’t count, but because I’d lost the wheel and wasn’t about to get nailed anytime soon anyhow.

I didn’t care much for the Novum wheel—the wheel of misconception, Lydia called it. She liked Novums because they made her breasts bigger and she cared about stuff like that. My fantasy form of birth control would be to cut off all the peckers around the world. Stack them in a big pile next to Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park for men to sit around and mourn over. That’d teach the ingrates to use their tongues.

Diaper rash medicine and dental floss had landed on Auburn’s spare pants, next to Cowardly Lion. When I picked them up, the stuffed lion clanked against the medicine. I unzipped his back and pulled out a half pint of tequila.

“Whoa, how’d you get here?”

The fact he was in Cowardly Lion wasn’t so odd; sometimes I hid bottles and forgot them. The odd thing was that he was tequila. I was monogamous with Yukon Jack. I tested his weight in my hand, read his label, then squinted at the sun. Tequila and sun go together. Has something to do with Mexico.

I look for signs everywhere, and a bottle of tequila suddenly appearing under my car was a definite sign I should enjoy the sun. I’d had a hard day; no one was around to gossip.

***

The tequila didn’t make me drunk at all. Driving the GroVont Highway, I noticed how sharp the houses looked, how alive the aspens. For the first time since Dad’s funeral I felt alert, on top of the situation. The weather sparkled. I sparkled. There was the Killdeer Cafe, then a minute later the Tastee-Freez sailed by on the left, and the Forest Service headquarters on the right. Behind it floated the Sagebrush Lounge in the old Talbot Taxidermy building. I wasn’t even driving, I was on a magic carpet rippling through my hometown.

I used to drink tequila in college, before I met Jack, but had quit for some reason I couldn’t recall. The bottle in the stuffed lion was a message from the past. College days. Life had been so simple and easy then. We all loved each other. People didn’t carry mean thoughts behind their eyes.

Today would be the day to drive up to the ranch. I owned it now, I guess. Or Mom did, but she didn’t care. Jenny Lind had foaled, and I loved Jenny Lind. I loved all horses.

A man yelled at me: “Maurey, pull over.”

I looked to the left through my open window at Mangum Potter in his white policeman’s car. Someone had made Mangum a deputy sheriff a few years ago, and it went to his head.

“Leave me alone, Mangum.”

“Pull over.”

“Suck a bull.”

“Please, pull over, Maurey. I won’t arrest you.”

A tourist car came in Mangum’s lane and he had to drop back, but just as I thought he’d gone away, there he was again back in my window. “It’s important, Maurey.”

I stopped the car and looked at myself in the rearview mirror. I looked okay. Nobody could tell I’d been drinking. If I spoke clearly and didn’t come off meek or anything, he couldn’t bother me. The last thing I needed was a raft of crap from Mangum Potter.

“Mangum, you got a lot of nerve stopping me. Dothan can get your badge pulled if I tell him to.”

His eyes wouldn’t look at me. He said, ‘‘Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared of you.”

Mangum’s hands went to the top of the Bronco and came down with Auburn. Auburn looked in the window at me and started whimpering.

Mangum’s eyes were not friendly. “You forgot something, Mrs. Talbot.”

My stomach went knot and my face drained. It had to be a dream.

“We got calls on you through town. You frightened people.”

My baby squirmed in Mangum’s hands. The hands were dirty with burned-off wart scars on both thumbs. “Give him to me.”

Mangum settled Auburn against his chest with its badge. “I can’t do that, Mrs. Talbot.”

“He’s my child.”

“You drove with your baby on the roof. You can’t be responsible for him.”

“Don’t take my baby.”

“If you were a tourist you’d be in jail, Mrs. Talbot.”

“I’ll go to jail, just give me my son.”

Mangum stepped back from my door. “Don’t do anything crazy now. I’ll take him to Dothan at the office. You go home and get some sleep.”

“Sleep?”

Mangum leaned over to peer down at me. “If you can’t sleep, consider what kind of woman forgets where she put her baby.”

I rolled up the window and started crying. “Mangum, you cruel asshole.”

“Go on home, Mrs. Talbot.”

Because of the jaundice after Auburn was born, the doctor put him next to my bed in a clear plastic box with bilirubin lights. A nurse taped a gauze strip over his eyes, and for some reason they wouldn’t tell me, she stuck an IV needle into the top of his head.

Then they left Auburn, naked, alone, and blind, where no one could touch him.

Lydia had brought me a portable eight-track tape player, and I lay there on my side, looking at my baby and listening to the
Blue
album by Joni Mitchell. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. For six hours I cried and cried until the front of my hospital gown was soaked. How could that be possible? There aren’t six hours’ worth of tears in the human body. People say crying is good for you and after you let it out you’ll feel better, but after six hours I was hopeless as ever.

That was the last time I cried until Mangum Potter drove away.

The afternoon Dad died Hank called Mom and Petey called me. I was giving Auburn a bath when the phone rang, and after I hung up I took Auburn out of the plastic basin to towel him dry. As I rubbed the towel up and down Auburn’s precious body, I went kind of blank and forgot time. I just kept rubbing his legs, then his back and arms. I touched his belly and thought of Dad’s skin. Dad’s neck, his face above his beard, and the backs of his hands were dark as my corral boots, but the rest of his body was the color of banana pulp.

I talked to Auburn as if he were Dad. Said the stuff we all wish we’d said—I planned to plant a line of aspens at the ranch. The cigarettes he found in my saddlebags were mine. Was he disappointed in me? I asked if he thought we should get Auburn baptized even though we didn’t belong to a church. Then I told Dad he was the only thing solid in my life, nothing would ever be real again. I said “I love you’’—all this time rubbing Auburn up and down with the towel.

That was the numbest I ever felt, more numb than Yukon Jack ever made me, more numb than the last time I made love to Dothan.

But all while I dried Auburn I never cried. That night fetal-positioned in bed, and the next day, then the funeral and the days after that—nothing. At times I felt like a monster, but I was just too empty for tears.

***

Someone tapped on the glass. A man I’d never seen before mouthed some words and did a crank-your-window-down motion with his hands. At first I ignored him, but that didn’t work so I cracked the window an inch.

He spoke distinctly, as if I might be foreign or deaf. “Are you okay?”

I nodded.

He pointed to a pickup on the shoulder across the road. A woman with her hair in foam curlers waved. The man said, “We were driving by and thought you might not be okay.”

“I’m okay.”

The man wasn’t prepared to leave me alone. He looked at the highway behind the Bronco, then hunched over to squint at me through the crack. “You’re in the middle of the lane.”

I stared at him.

“A car coming along might rear-end you.”

I was too tired to fight back. “Thanks for stopping. I’ll move my car.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m unhappy.”

His head moved back. “Then nothing’s the matter.”

“I’m fine.”

***

Two pickups and an ambulance were parked outside the Sagebrush Lounge. Buck Fratelli keeps things way dark inside so a jealous cowboy coming through the door has to adjust long enough for snugglers to move apart or, in extreme cases, break for the back door. What it does is leave you standing up front until everyone present has copped their attitude.

Faith Fratelli sat on a stool behind the bar, studying
Password
on a color TV with a purple-soaked picture. The Sagebrush used to be Talbot Taxidermy, and Buck wouldn’t buy the dump unless Dothan’s dad threw in his mutant animal collection. Taxidermists have a unique sense of humor. Along a shelf on both sides of the TV stood an array of jackalopes, fur-bearing trout, unicorns, sage hens with huge breasts. Buck’s prize piece was a Wyoming werewolf, which is a butt mount of a whitetail deer with glass eyes in the hips, the tail made into a nose, and a pair of razorback fangs set in the asshole. Vicious-looking creature when you first see it and disgusting after that.

A voice on the TV whispered, “The password is ‘swordfish.’”

Faith blew cigarette smoke out her nostrils. “Why do stupid people smile all the time? This guy looks like a Mormon missionary.”

Other than the skinny tie and that shit-eater under his nose, the guy didn’t look a bit like a missionary. His shirt was purple.

Three ancient timber wolves sat on stools nodding over Blue Ribbon beer. The oldest wolf of them all was Oly Pedersen, who’d made a profession of outliving sidekicks. He’d signed up with Grandpa Pierce back in World War I, and they did the blood brothers thing men get into living in trenches with other men, so Dad always went out of his way to take care of Oly—drove him to the doctor, had him over for dinner on Christmas, that sort of thing. When I was a kid Oly’d chain-sawed me a rocking horse that was really neat.

A kid too young to be in the Sagebrush slapped at a Home Run pinball game while a skinny guy in white overalls and a fat guy in a wheelchair shot pool. The wheelchair guy rammed the cue ball like he wanted to kill it and hollered “
Banzai
,
motherfucker
” on every shot.

I said, “Everclear.”

Faith glanced at me for the first time. “Your makeup’s a mess, Maurey.”

“I’m not wearing makeup.”

The wheelchair man spun around. “Hippy chicks don’t wear makeup. Bras either. And they don’t shave nothin’.”

“Shut up, Shane,” Faith said with no energy, as if she said it often and didn’t expect to be heard. “You making purple passion, Maurey?”

“The password is none of your business.”

Faith missed it—flew right over her head. “Kids buy Everclear cause it’s 180 proof. They mix it with gallons and gallons of Hawaiian Punch, call it purple passion.” Faith pronounced it the same as everyone else in town—High-wayan.

“I’m in kind of a hurry here.”

“The boys use it to get the girls drunk.” Faith had pitch-black hair pulled into a ponytail and two turquoise bracelets on her left wrist. She was pleasant and Buck was smart, and between them they made ends meet, which isn’t easy in GroVont.

I waited while she rang up the fifth and slid it into a sack. The grinner on TV said, “Shark,” and his female partner said, “Lawyer.”

“What do you want with Everclear, Maurey?” Faith asked. “You’re a Yukon woman.”

“I’m gonna drink myself to death.”

Faith laughed without taking her eyes off
Password
. “Don’t you wish.”

I dropped two dollar bills on the bar. “Get Oly a Blue Ribbon, Faith, tell him it’s from Dad.”

The pool players were conferring, and as I left, Shane, the fat one in the chair, wheeled into my path. His head twitched. “We have a wager.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Lloyd claims that dime in your back pocket is heads facing out, and I maintain it is tails.”

I stuck my fingers in the pocket in question. There was plenty of room, for fingers, anyway. “How much did you bet?”

“The next round.”

“You both lose, it’s a quarter.”

“Heads or tails quarter?”

“Isn’t there a rule against leaving an AA meeting and coming straight to a bar?”

Shane went into a laughter spaz where he bobbed up and down on his hands. “I told you she watches. Every day, sitting in that window, watching and watching.”

Lloyd spoke for the first time. “It’s Coca-Cola.”

“Yeah, right. At least I put mine in a coffee cup.”

The flab on Shane’s face arranged itself into a pout. He held the glass toward me. “It is Coca-Cola. Want a taste?”

“I’d rather die.”

“We don’t drink alcoholic beverages, ma’am,” Lloyd said.

“Then why hang out in a bar?”

The two glanced at each other, and Lloyd kind of shrugged. Shane looked back up at me. “Bars are all we know. We ceased alcohol consumption but can’t decide what to do instead.”

“When you find out, tell me.”

Lloyd held his pool cue with one hand and rubbed his overalls with the other. “We’ll do that, ma’am.”

I stared down at the grinning Shane. “Now, wheel out of my way. I’m busy.”