Sorrow Floats (3 page)

Sam Callahan says the only important decision is whether to commit suicide and die now or not commit suicide and die later. He read that in a book. I decided to die now.

As I drove up the river road to our family place, deep blue plastered the sky all the way to Yellowstone in the north and the Winds in the east. Earlier I had been too drunk to notice the air or the silver-gray sagebrush. On the valley floor the cottonwoods had small, lime green leaves, then as I moved up the mountain the leaves curled in on themselves until, at the ranch itself, each naked twig was tipped by a furry bud.

I pulled off next to the Miner Creek culvert and dug under the seat for a Flintstones never-tip cup, then I walked over to our buck-and-rail fence. The TM ranch stretched up the rise to the frame ranch house Grandpa built to replace the one-room cabin where Dad and three brothers and a sister were raised. Hank had the mares and foals fenced in the east pasture and the geldings strung along the creek. Frostbite the Dad killer grazed in a bunch feeding on bromegrass near the far irrigation ditch. The pasture was a dull yellow veined by dark green along the ditches where Hank was already moving water.

I had almost killed my son. Next time he might not be lucky, therefore, I had to stop. Easy logic.

Only a heartbeat ago Dad made us bull boats by cutting the ends off watermelons and setting in chokecherry masts with bandanna sails. Petey and I squealed up and down the creek, crashing through willows, encasing ourselves in mud from the knees down. We turned pinecones into boat families of a Mom, Dad, two kids, and a horse. Petey’s family usually sank, but mine bobbed clear to the river.

I lived for horses back then. My mare, Molly, followed me like a beagle, once right into the house and into my room. The night lightning struck her I cried till dawn. I thought I would never feel that bad again.

Here’s what I couldn’t grab: the string connecting that to this, how the girl who slept in cowgirl boots and played with pinecone dolls became the woman who dressed like a Salt Lake hooker and hid bourbon bottles in vacuum cleaner bags. I pried the lid off Auburn’s cup and poured it to the rim with Everclear. Was the problem nothing but alcohol? I’d been drinking more or less regular since college, although I didn’t drink a bit while I was pregnant with Auburn. I only began drinking on a daily basis after Frostbite killed Dad. Closing my eyes, I tried to call up what I felt like before booze. A few watery images floated past—watermelon boats, Shannon, myself in the mirror in my cheerleading outfit, riding—but I couldn’t hold what I felt like, what I thought about in the gap between going to bed and going to sleep, how I met the morning.

The first Everclear went down like gasoline. Made me shudder, which alcohol hadn’t done in some time. I’d only tasted Everclear once, and then it was mixed with a washtub of cherry Kool-Aid at a frat party in Laramie. That was my sophomore year after I got hurt by a boy named Park, short for Parker. One day when everything was going dandy he just dropped out of school and went home to Maine. I rebounded into a Phi Delt bed. Randy, the Phi Delt, taught me lost weekend drinking and sex without emotional attachment.

I tipped the cup and took in as much as possible in one long chug. The stomach burn was amazing. Park popping into my mind was a surprise, since he generally stayed on the fringe, where he belonged. Park had been sad and sensitive, probably my only true emotional attachment even vaguely connected to sex. With Park, I had the friendship of Sam and the teenage romance of Dothan. We talked about it for weeks before I took away Park’s virginity, then when he discovered he wasn’t my first, or second, or even third, something in Park closed.

Two Swainson’s hawks flew down the river. As I watched, the darker, higher male dived into the female in a feather explosion. The hawks plummeted, fused together, wings beating each other instead of air, until, yards above the river, they broke into separate birds again. If people could mate like hawks—a midair crashing of bodies—I might give passion another try.

I poured and drank again. The bottle was over a quarter gone and all I felt was belly fire and a little wooziness in my forehead. When Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, Dad sat in his recliner and stared at the wall all morning. He liked movie stars, and I guess he really liked Marilyn. I’d never seen him sad before, never realized grown-ups got sad before that. I made him iced tea with lemon, but he said he wasn’t thirsty. I don’t think he noticed what I was offering.

Marilyn Monroe was into fucking. She was the symbol of fucking and she died naked; then John Kennedy died, the pill came along, Vietnam, silly drugs and hard alcohol, and suddenly I’m on a fence sending myself into a twenty-two-year-old’s grave. Auburn wouldn’t even know I died on purpose to save him. He’d grow up thinking his mom the lush drank herself to death.

Couldn’t allow that. Suicide to save a child was brave, but drinking till you died was weak. All I had left that mattered was how Auburn thought of me later on, and I couldn’t die and let him grow up blaming weakness.

A note. Had to tell Auburn it was for him. Without a note, Dothan could turn the boy against me. Life would have been wasted.

One more slug, straight from the bottle this time, and a fairly coherent walk back to the Bronco. Only ten, twelve steps, nothing to brag about. Trouble with the door, then big trouble with the glove box. Sunglasses, fuses, unknown key, corkscrew, burnt candle,
Don’t Vote
button, four-inch bit from a busted bridle—no paper but the Bronco registration and a pink speeding ticket Dothan hadn’t told me about. Eighty-five in a thirty-five zone, Pocatello, Idaho, March 2, 1973.

“March two,” I said out loud, willing recall. The day was gone. Hell, March was gone, a shadow in the forest of my memory. Month not to eat oysters. In like a lion, out like a lamb; what the heck did that mean?

The heck.

I dug a red crayon from under the passenger seat, then barked my head on the rearview mirror. Sent the mirror askew. Askew. Crayon said
Scarlet
on the side, with evidence of slurpy sucking on the pointy end. God, I tried to keep foreign objects from Auburn’s mouth.

I two-hand-rubbed the parking ticket across my leg to make it smooth.

Auburn my son

I did it to save you from me. Dad lies. I loved you.

I drew a scarlet line through
I loved you
, then wrote it again.
I love you.

“Yeah, right,” I said. Now—back to the bottle and down to business.

I nailed an entire cup of Everclear in one drooly gulp. Gagged. Choked back vomit. Ran my hand through my hair. We’re talking tunnel focus here, an oil filter-loosening tool wrapped around my skull. The stuff was working.

I sat on the bottom rail and rested my cheek on the top. An infinitely small red speck came from a crack in the wood, then crawled out of vision. The wood texture was beautiful, real, and close. I put out my tongue to taste it. Without emotion, I wondered what death was like. Would it be a nothing, not even knowing I was nothing, or would I exist without need? It didn’t matter. We’re born from zip and go to zip. Born naked.

Marilyn Monroe died naked. That was the way to go—the way you came in. Marilyn Monroe was the symbol of fucking, and when she died naked, people she didn’t know sat in chairs and felt sad. Even the people I knew wouldn’t be sad at me. Sam Callahan, Shannon, Lydia, Hank, Mom—they’d all say “She lived a tragic, useless life. Too bad,” then they’d eat supper and go to bed and get up the next day and nothing would be different. Dothan would have to find a sitter.

A truck rattled down the road behind me, going toward town. Scared me into pouring another cup of Everclear. What would I have done if the driver stopped? I hit the cup hard.

I wanted to be Marilyn Monroe and go the way I came. A person of substance would never die in a windbreaker and cutoffs. Had to move up the creek so no one could see me naked. Suicide was embarrassing enough without being laughed at. I held the bottle up to my eye, two-thirds empty. One-third full, said the optimist. Whatever. Could I make it up the creek to privacy? I could do anything requiring balance. I was Rocky Mountain vaulting champion of 1962—same summer Marilyn Monroe got naked and died. If she could do it, so could the vaulting champion.

Going across the fence, I caught my foot on the rail and flung over on my neck and back. The world spun and the sky was no longer blue, but a dun color with black-and-yellow shifting holes. My legs went bad, as in non-functioning numbness. I turned over but couldn’t stand, which caused frustration. Dad crawled to die with a view; who was I to break tradition?

The bottle swung below my breasts, held by my teeth. As I crawled things stuck in my palms and I had to go over sagebrush because my head wouldn’t lift to see the path. Must have looked like an anteater. The ground tilted, I went off a drop, and part of me was suddenly wet. Far enough. I crawled out of the creek and spit out the bottle. When I unzipped the windbreaker Charley fell out.

With the T-shirt pulled half over my head, a wave of nausea struck and I had to lie down. Inside the shirt was safe, all white, like being in a veil. To strip the cutoffs I had to lie on my back and shoulders with my hair in mud. Groveling to get naked. Groveling to die. Tawdry but with the idealism of the nude.

I rolled into the submissive end of doggie style and looked down at the body I was about to kill. Not that bad a body to spend a life in. It produced two children. It could feel sunshine and water and orgasms. My nails tended to split, and from where I knelt, the breasts sagged, but they had been a fairly good size when I was nursing. Which was another thing my body could do. Adios tits, farewell belly, later gater pubic hair. I’m outta here.

I raised my head and drank it all—sucked down the fifth. Then, naked, I lay on my side, looking across the surface of Miner Creek at some weeds and a tiny yellow flower on the other bank. First flower of spring. Life was a cheat and a bitch. The black holes grew bigger until they took the flower, then the creek. My fingers found Charley and pulled him to me. Like Mom’s breast, I put his barrel between my lips. Affection.

When I met Sam Callahan back when we were both thirteen and starting seventh grade, he confessed this dream of someday being a deep and sensitive novelist who commanded women’s love and men’s respect. All through junior high and high school he scribbled in three-subject notebooks, filling them with scads of poems and short stories. Most of the stories mixed baseball and romance, with a few sliding over into science fiction.

Sam soon learned deep and sensitive is another way of saying lonesome, and the closest he’d come so far to commanding women’s love and men’s respect through writing was his job as sports and entertainment intern at the
Greensboro Record
in Greensboro, North Carolina.

My favorite story he wrote back in high school was the one in which Death turned into a cute little mouse named Bob. Bob wore green shorts and a red football jersey, and he skittered across people while they slept, which killed them so he could collect their souls. Sam said the human soul looks and tastes like Swiss cheese.

Dying from being touched by a mouse became known as getting Bobbed. People were so scared of getting Bobbed that they took to sleeping under loads of blankets with their head covered so no skin showed. Outside of bed they wore layers and layers of polyester mouse-proof clothing and hoods and masks and gloves up to here so no one ever saw anyone, which made them even more scared because they thought Bob might be among them in disguise. A carpenter invented a sealed wooden box that guaranteed nothing and no one could ever touch the person inside. So each and every person in the world crammed themselves into individual boxes and pulled the top shut so they could never be touched by Bob.

One hundred years later spacemen from the planet Asthmador landed on Earth. The aliens hopped on the radio and called their wisest elders back home to ask them this question: Since every single Earthling was dead in a coffin, who put them there?

The elders shrugged their mandibles and said, “Beats me.”

After I read the story Sam said, “It’s an allegory.”

“How did the Earth people know being scampered over by Bob would kill them if everyone Bob scampered over was dead and couldn’t talk?”

Sam went all sulky, said I didn’t understand literature and he wasn’t showing me any more stories. He was lying.

Mom is scared to death of death, but Dad took it with the attitude of a cowboy—if you can’t understand something, turn it into a joke. Once at a Pierce family reunion up at Granite Hot Springs my born-again uncle from Dubois laid into Dad about his personal savior. My cousin Stella Jean and I were weaving lupines into a hula skirt when Dad’s brother Scott stuck his face right up next to Dad and challenged him to accept Christ in his heart.

“Don’t you believe in anything?” Scott asked.

“I believe I’ll eat another hot dog.”

Scott’s face and neck filled up with blood. “Where do you think you’ll go when you die, Buddy?”

Dad slid a willow stick lengthwise through a wienie. “San Francisco.”

***

The Two Ocean Lake underwater record was four minutes, fourteen seconds, held by Kim Schmidt’s cousin from Nebraska. I dived off the pier and kicked twice, found the bottom, then the root. Counting by Mississippis, I wrapped my right arm under the slick wood and held on with my left. Thirty-two Mississippi, thirty-three Mississippi, thirty-four Mississippi…At sixty Mississippi I started over. The water felt cold yet caressing, and in my mind I saw trout and weeds waving by, ignoring me. On the second sixty Mississippi my chest tightened to the point I had to release a few bubbles. The yellow came again. As a child running in circles till I fell, as a little girl bucked off her horse, now as a teenager breaking the Two Ocean Lake underwater record, yellow always preceded black. I exhaled more bubbles, but that didn’t help the chest pain. I opened my eyes—no trout, no weeds, only water and the vague form of the downed aspen on the bottom. Lungs really hurt, I’d stopped counting but couldn’t recall when. My fingers lost the root. I clawed the bottom, flailing arms and legs pushing me down as the water carried me up. Lungs screamed, panic choked my chest, I fought to stay underwater. My face broke through with a sob intake of air.

“Look who’s alive.”

“I wouldn’t call that live yet.”

No forgiving hangover blankness here, I knew the facts in a heartbeat—Everclear, the Flintstones cup, Marilyn Monroe. It took a second to come up with why, then I saw my baby on the roof.

Shit. I’d failed.

I even knew exactly where I was. Although I hadn’t slept here in years, I knew Sam Callahan’s bed without opening my eyes.

A male voice said, “I’ve got pipe to fix.”

“You spend more time on her plumbing than mine.” Her would be me.

“She pays and you don’t.”

I slit my eyes open a crack and saw Hank Elkrunner and Lydia Callahan kissing each other good-bye over by the door. Her hand crept up his back into his long Blackfoot hair. His hand slid to the base of her spine.

“Be home tonight,” Lydia ordered.

Hank gave her a love spank. “Doubt it. Lauren Bacall is set to pop.”

I closed my eyes. Watching other people’s affection makes me sad. After he left, Lydia lit a cigarette, then came to the bed and touched my forehead. “Hank says you’re alive,” she said.

“He’s too good for you.”

Lydia’s hand twitched, like it would when you think you’re talking to a person in a coma and the person talks back. “Hank’s the best.”

“You don’t deserve him.”

“Yes, I do.”

Lydia’d been a mess when she met Hank Elkrunner. Now she had that reformed-drunk-someone-good-loves-me smugness that turns me catty. Hell, I could stop drinking if someone good loved me.

Lydia sat in an easy chair next to the bed and opened a newspaper. Her drug of choice had gone from gin to current events. “How’s your head?”

“There’s a spike driven through my third eye.”

“I shouldn’t wonder. Did you kill the whole fifth?”

I didn’t answer. My head hurt, my nose hurt, my crotch hurt, all the muscles in my back hurt—my advice is never botch a suicide.

The paper rustled as Lydia turned a page. “This guy John Ehrlichman is frightening. He reminds me of your husband. The others are all lying snakes, but Ehrlichman’s a lying barracuda.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “Where’s Auburn?”

“He’s home. Delilah Talbot moved in to take care of him.”

That brought up a dozen questions, none of which I had the energy to ask. Lydia talked as she read the paper.

“Doc Petrov pumped your stomach, but he said it was too late to do much good. You went into respiratory arrest, then your kidneys kind of crumpled and they stuck in a catheter. You should have seen yourself, Maurey. So many tubes running in and out you looked like a chemistry experiment.”

“How long?”

“Two days here and three in intensive care. When Hank brought you off the mountain you were choking on vomit and all that blood was gushing out your nose, I thought we’d lost you.”

“Yeah, right.”

***

Auburn and I are on top of Teton Pass in the early spring and I park the Bronco to watch a fantastically lit sunrise. Beams bend around Jackson Peak, snow on the Sleeping Indian glows with a fire of its own. I step out with my bottle to be closer to the beauty and breathe a prayer of thanks, but I forget to set the emergency brake and the Bronco, with Auburn in his car seat, rolls down the pass. I run—run harder and harder, reach for the back bumper, but the Bronco is inches beyond my fingertips. Auburn laughs, trusting me. I dive and catch the trailer hitch but still cannot stop the rolling as the car’s momentum drags me down the highway. At the cliff the front wheels go over, wrenching the hitch from my hands, and I’m left flat with my head over the edge to watch the car flip front over back, over and over down the mountain. Auburn’s cries fill the canyon until the final crash. Then, I’m swept by silence. Once again yellow globs rush me, turning black.

***

When I met Lydia she used to drink a pint of Gilbey’s gin at ten-thirty every night. She and Sam would sit through the sports and weather—Lydia didn’t give a hoot about news in those days—then Sam would fetch her bottle and a two-ounce shot glass with an etching of the Lincoln Memorial on the side. Lydia filled and threw down eight shots—bang, bang—one right after another before bed.

She never offered me any gin, so I can’t claim she led me astray, although whenever us kids got way-rowdy or wound up she’d give us each a yellow Valium. I kind of liked those. They made everything fuzzy as the line between me and the rest of the world became less distinct.

When Shannon was teething Lydia showed us how to dip the pacifier in whiskey and honey. Shannon will probably grow up with the idea that pain is relieved by alcohol and sugar. It’s not.

My own mom lives in a drugstore wonderland now, but as a kid the only thing I saw her drink was eggnog on Christmas Eve. The woman had a remarkably low tolerance—one cup and she’s giggling like a ten-year-old and dancing the rumba to “Jingle Bell Rock.”

Every year she and Petey would sing “We three kings of Orient are, smoking on a rubber cigar, we got loaded, it exploded—BOOM.”

Dad drank beer at rodeos and football games. Since he died, I’ve been told in his younger days he could hook back the bourbon, but I never saw it.

The thing is, alcohol had become a factor in my behavior. It snuck up on me. I loved Yukon Jack in a way I wouldn’t care to love a man, but I hadn’t planned on needing him. I didn’t ask for marriage.

***

The weekend passed in two slots—bad dreams and awake. Awake was a bad dream come true, so I preferred the other kind. Twice a day Lydia and Hank helped me into the bathroom, where I sat amid threats of another catheter if I didn’t go.

“You’ve peed on your last sheet,” Lydia said. “I’m tired of wiping up your social blunders.”

Hank nodded in solemn agreement.

Social blunder
is a term Lydia uses a lot. She’ll be at someone’s house and burn a hole in the rug with her cigarette or break an antique doodad, and she’ll put one hand over her mouth and say, “Oh, my, I’ve committed a social blunder.”

Hostesses doubt her sincerity, but I think she is sincere, she just can’t deal with honest embarrassment. “Social blunder” is better than what she used to say, which was “Fuck me silly.”

During one of the awake periods Lydia asked me if I’d meant to harm myself or if the rooftop episode had simply shoved me off the deep end, alcohol-wise.

“Didn’t you read the note?”

“We thought of that and looked, but the only paper Hank found was a speeding ticket on the seat that Auburn’d colored on. Anything you wrote must have blown away.”

***

I awoke soaked in sweat after a nasty dream, in which a bald eagle swooped down to pluck Auburn off a picnic blanket, and found Lydia smoking in her usual chair at the end of the bed, glaring at the TV. She must have sat there most of the week.

She said, “Dirty Dick Nixon is a boil on the butt of a sumo wrestler.”

“Why watch if it upsets you?” I asked.

“Because if I relax for a moment, America will flush her freedom down the toilet. You’ve got mail.”

Lydia flicked her cigarette at her jeans’ leg and rubbed the ashes into the denim. She didn’t believe in ashtrays. When she was done she’d balance the butt on its end so every table in the house was covered by little filter columns. Once a week or so Hank went around scooping the mess into a paper bag.

One letter was from Sam in North Carolina and one from Dothan across town. My name on Dothan’s envelope was typed, evidently by his secretary Lurlene, since Dothan can’t type, which I took as a bad sign.

Sam’s letter was written in red ink.

Hey Maurey,

Alicia has a problem with foreplay. I met her covering an Up With People concert at Page High. This small woman with Judy Collins eyes and a tight sweater took my hand and led me to a crawl space under the stage. I could see the audience, from the knees down anyway, tapping their feet as seventy-five kids above us proclaimed their wholesomeness and Alicia tore off my pants.

Later at Sambo’s she ate like it was Thanksgiving and told me she equates danger with sexual tension. Since then she’s turned tigress on a ferris wheel, in a public toilet at a baseball game, in a booth at Dairy Queen, and on a coffin in an open grave at the cemetery. In bed, she’s frigid.

Maurey, I don’t know if I want a long-term relationship with this woman. She might be a poor role model for Shannon.

You should see our beautiful daughter grow. She gets prettier and more like you every day. Which scares the pants off me. I caught a 14-year-old boy talking to her at the shopping center yesterday. I was her father when I was fourteen, I know what those little monsters think.

Shannon gave a report on Wyoming the last day of school before vacation. Took my antelope heads into Mrs. Fenster’s homeroom and told the class they were wild Yellowstone ibex. Even the teacher believed her. Where does she get this tendency to put people on? Surely not from my side of the family. We went to dinner at Tarheels and Shannon refused to eat off the kids’ menu. She told Alicia and the waitress she was thirteen and I was lying about her age because I’m cheap. Alicia stuck her hand between my napkin and my lap and we had a fight later. I said perversion is big fun, only not with my daughter in sight, and Alicia called me a hypocrite. The woman who fucked under Up With People called me a hypocrite.

I’m ready to change girlfriends. Here’s a repercussion of our actions I hadn’t planned on, Maurey: Women go ape over single men with young daughters. Shannon’s a better line than a big dog.

She put your picture in Grandma Callahan’s silver locket and won’t take it off even to sleep. I asked her what she wants to do for the summer and she said go to Wyoming. Fat chance with me on the stock car beat. We might slip out there for a week in August, but in the meantime I’ve signed her up for swimming lessons at the club and hired a black woman named Gus to stick around weekday afternoons and fix supper.