Lydia (27 page)

Which brings us to late August, when Snuffy sent me up past Gibbon Meadows to check a trap line.

***

The day was warmish and clear blue, with a hint of autumn. The air was almost too sparkling for summer. Birds and plants had a shimmer of anticipation you don’t see during the hot days of July. I rode up an old wagon track from God knows when. Maybe a prospector cut it, or the Army back in the ’80s. In 1923, the Park didn’t have rules concerning where a man could drive a motorcycle.

I rolled through a stand of lodgepole pine down into aspen that gave way to willows along a soggy creek bottom and turned into a pretty meadow where I came up on two men on horseback roped to a grizzly sow. A yearling cub huffed to and fro in a nervous fit off to one side while the mother grizzly charged one horse and then wheeled on the other. The men—Bill Cox and Shadrach Pierce, by God—whooped and hollered and flailed hats at their horses, making a mess of the peaceful afternoon.

Any fool who’s ever roped so much as a fence post knows it takes three men, three ropes, and three well-trained mounts to subdue a full-grown grizzly bear. You triangulate—offer resistance from two sides when she makes a run at the third. There’s no sense in two men alone attempting the stunt. Even if you choose a sickly bear and your horses are powerful, what are you going to use for an exit plan?

The grizzly reared up on her hind legs and paused a moment to gather her wits, then she dropped, bounced off her front feet, and charged Shad. Bill’s noose had her by the right hindfoot, while Shad’s was cinched around her neck. The sow was dark brown with a dusty gray hump and a flat face. One ear had been notched in a fight or by a bullet. Dragging Bill’s horse with her, she made ragged progress on Shad, whose appaloosa shied sidewise, snorting and circling to avoid those awful claws. Shad dug at his scabbard, but she was coming so quick he had to reel in rope with both hands, like playing a really big trout, or she would shake off his necktie and be clear to finish him without restraint.

Bill screamed profane words at his horse whose eyes bulged in panic. The bay bucked and spun, causing Bill to hang up on the rope looped around his pommel. The cub was bleating like a castrated sheep and the mama roared. She’d straightened out her confusion. Now, she was single-mindedly set on killing Shad.

I said something along the lines of “I knew it would be those two.” Something like that. What I meant was I’d been braced for months, waiting for the event that would explode my life, and I’d always suspected when that event arrived, Shad and Bill would be close by.

Then I shouted, “
Holy shit!
” or “
Hellfire!
”—I can’t recall which—gunned the beJesus out of my motorcycle, popped the clutch, and charged the bear. I spun dirt clear across the meadow, making as much noise as possible on a Harley-Davidson. Which is a lot of noise.

The bear glanced at me but kept after Shad. I suppose she’d decided to tear him apart first, then deal with the rest of us one at a time. I passed so close to her I could have kicked her backside, and only swerved at the last moment to keep from flipping over Bill’s rope.

I came in for a second pass, but she ignored that one too. Shad’s horse was circling so fast I was about to get my neck wrung. So, instead of making another run at the mother, I turned to the cub.

As I said before, this was a yearling cub, so he wasn’t cuddly as a Teddy bear. He was big enough to cause damage in his own right if he got angry, only so far, the cub was more frightened than dangerous. He stood on two legs, looking altogether like a hunchbacked teenager, while I spun a 360-degree, dirt-kicking slide around him there. He couldn’t swivel quick enough to face me clear around. He just stood there, bleating, disoriented by so much sound.

You want to get a female grizzly bear’s attention, go after her cub. Only once you’ve got her diverted, I’d advise moving away with haste. The bear left off Shad and came across the clearing like a freight train jumping the tracks. She yanked Bill backwards from his saddle and the saddle frontward from the horse. The bear ran, dragging the saddle twenty feet to the rear. Shad’s horse ran with her, the alternative being broke legs.

I saw Shad and Bill were safe for the moment and the time had come to clear out, but it was too late. Grizzlies can outrun any horse, and believe me, this one could catch a motorcycle spinning in dirt. She came up fast and big and swatted me off the motorcycle, tearing my shoulder. I flipped in midair and landed on my back, and she was on me like a dog on a bone. There was this moment of me looking up into that grizzly’s eyes. It was a moment I’ll remember long after I’m dead.

“Wait a minute,” Lydia said.

“You face down an enraged grizzly and tell me I’m wrong,” Oly said. “Till then, I don’t want to hear another word.”

“That works for me.”

Her mouth opened. I saw drips of spittle hanging off her teeth. Smelled the stench of her breath. I thought then about Evangeline, how sweet she was and how short our time together had been. I thought dying here was better than dying in the trenches, because I’d known her, and dying before I met Evangeline would have meant my life was wasted, whereas dying now meant I’d amounted to something. You’d be amazed and awestruck to know how much a man can think in the heartbeat before oblivion. Time stretches. That’s how I figure it. You can have three minutes worth of thought process in a single second.

A nickel-sized hole appeared in the bear’s forehead and blood gurgled out. I heard the loudest shot I’d ever heard, louder than the shell that wounded me in France. Another hole appeared in the roof of her mouth. She made a sound like gargling salt water, then she collapsed.

Leroy punched out the bottom right pane on Lydia’s back door. He reached through the glass shards, opened the door, and entered her utility room. He moved past the washer and dryer, into the kitchen, where he crossed to the refrigerator and drank his fill of vanilla soy milk straight from the bottle, until milk ran down his chin and dribbled onto the floor.

He set the milk on the counter next to the telephone and left the kitchen for the living room, where he found Zelda standing by the open front door.

“It wasn’t locked,” she said.

“Shut it.”

“What?”

“The neighbors know the old lady is out of town. We don’t want them seeing the door open and calling the pigs, now do we, you dumb twat?”

“Okay.” Zelda closed the door. “I’m going to find some new clothes. These I’ve got on are starting to smell like you.”

Leroy ignored her. He went into Lydia’s office, which had once been my bedroom, and rummaged through the desk. He found piles of unopened bills, a pint bottle of Jim Beam Shannon had missed when she took her turn at snooping, and a manuscript entitled
We Don’t Need No Stinking Balls
.
The name on the title page was Sylvia Dupree, who had for years been one of Lydia’s authors before Oothoon Press shut down when Lydia went underground. Sylvia’s treatise was based on the systematic elimination of men. She claimed spermless procreation is now scientifically possible, and therefore, the unnecessary gender should be phased out.

Interestingly enough, I later tracked down Sylvia Dupree and discovered she is an animal-control officer in Forty Five, South Carolina, named Ralph Singleton. He’d written the Oothoon books as satire, but when they blossomed into hits, he kept his true feelings under wraps.

Leroy threw the manuscript in the trash.

Zelda’s voice came from Lydia’s room. “There’s some men’s clothes in here. You want a change?”

“Get me a belt.”

“Don’t you want clean underwear?”

“A belt.”

Leroy drained the Jim Beam, then he went back in the living room and knocked over a Tiffany-style lamp, on general principle.

Zelda stood in Lydia’s doorway, holding Hank’s old concha belt from his rodeo days. “What’d you do that for?”

“Because I could.”

“They’re going to know we was in here.”

“So?

“And for your information, Mr. Big Shot, no one’s called cops pigs since Woodstock ended. Even I know that much.”

Zelda moved on to Shannon’s room to rifle the closet, in hopes of finding something she could wear in public. Lydia’s closet had been a washout. Leroy walked back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator again. He found nothing but an empty jar of Grey Poupon, two artichokes, and some leftover salmon loaf. He tasted the salmon loaf and, in disgust, threw it through the soy milk he’d left on the counter.

As soy milk splattered on the wall and phone, Leroy saw the blinking light on the answering machine.

He poked Play.

Beep.

“Hi, Lydia. It’s me. Shannon. Shannon Callahan. I’m flying into Las Vegas this afternoon and I need you to pick me up. I’m on Delta. The plane gets in at 4:10 p.m., which should leave you plenty of time to swing by and”

Beep.

“Get me. If I miss you guys, I’ll fly on to Santa Barbara and leave a message on your phone as to when I’ll be there. If I miss you in Santa Barbara, I’ll go on to that writer’s house. I’m sure I can track down anyone famous as Loren Paul.”

Beep.

“Don’t let Roger get away.”

Leroy called out, “Time to move your ass.”

“I’m not through making my choices.”

“Anyone not in the truck in forty seconds gets left in this hole.”

Zelda came into the kitchen wearing Shannon’s ex-boyfriend’s UNCG Spartans basketball jersey. “What do you think, Charley? Does this make me look fat?”

By the time her flight landed in Las Vegas, Shannon had worked herself into such a state of nerves that the red welt of a hive popped up on the fleshy side of her arm, in the elbow crook. She was sitting next to a talker, of course. Airlines always sat Shannon beside talkers. She imagined they had a computer file of people who wouldn’t complain if they were treated shabbily, and she was on it. This talker was a chamber-of-commerce type in a sports jacket he bought on sale in a pro shop at a West Jordan golf course. He tried to sell her a time-share on the Salton Sea in California.

“The Salton Sea is the new playground of the stars,” he shouted at her, even though his mouth was close enough for her to smell Altoids. “America’s next Riviera.”

Shannon said, “What’s a time-share?” and spent the next hour staring out the window while the man answered her question.

So, in Las Vegas, when she came through Baggage Claim and found Lydia, standing beside a stainless-steel water fountain, her arms crossed over her chest and her lips puckered in annoyance, Shannon was ready for her turn at talking.

“I need to find a store. I was in such a hurry, for fear I might miss the next plane and be stuck waiting, that I drove straight from Dad’s place to the airport. I don’t have a toothbrush or fresh panties, and I need Benadryl cream. How’s your trip, so far?

Lydia wasn’t about to let Shannon get away with idle chatter. She said, “This better be good. We’ve lost two hours for you.”

Shannon fought the urge to scratch her hive welt. It was a losing battle. She never had been adept at not scratching itches. “I’m here to rip the moose’s Achilles tendon with my bare teeth. Like you said. Aren’t you thrilled I’m taking your advice?”

“I am far from thrilled. This journey is on a tight schedule and we have no time for your personal dramatics.” Lydia raised her chin in righteous indignation. “Who is your moose?”

Shannon said, “Roger.”

Lydia fell back a step. She steadied herself with one hand on the drinking fountain. “You chose Roger Pierce as your reason to face tomorrow?”

Shannon covered her nerves with glibness. It’s a family tradition. “Why not? Roger is there. He’s a moose. I’m a wolf.”

“A cradle-robbing wolf.”

Shannon gave up the fight and scratched. “I can’t believe that would bother you.”

Lydia bit the edge of her lower lip as she studied Shannon. In spite of what appeared to be a case of fleas, her granddaughter certainly looked more alert than she had yesterday on the couch. The stunned-cow flatness had left her eyes, replaced by a crystal light, like a person with a high fever. Her posture had gone from braced-for-a-blow to hopeful.

“Actually, I’m impressed you had the imagination to choose him,” Lydia said. “I wouldn’t have thought you capable of originality.” She frowned. “Aren’t you two related, in some bizarre fashion?”

“I’m trying not to let community standards affect my actions. You and Mom are my role models in that way.” Shannon looked down past the various carrels. “Where is the boy? I need to get started.”

Lydia marched off toward the escalator. Shannon followed, a step to the side and a bit behind. Even though the airport was packed by tourists, gamblers, and families trailing packs of small children, the hordes parted for Lydia. Shannon, who was used to pushing her way through crowds, couldn’t help but wonder what about this woman made people instinctively get out of her way.

As they were passing an Orange Julius stand, Lydia turned on Shannon. “You just be careful he’s not a passing fancy. Roger’s going through an emotional firestorm on this trip. He doesn’t need a female using him to pull herself out of a funk.”

Shannon looked down at Lydia. She’d never before realized she was at least an inch taller than her grandmother. Lydia had always been such a huge presence that she made Shannon feel small by comparison.

Shannon said, “How comfortable are you giving lectures against using men?”

Lydia almost smiled. Instead she sniffed. “I have extremely high standards in loved ones. You’d do well not to give me cause for shame.”

***

They found Oly and Roger down by the car rentals, feeding nickels into a slot machine. To be precise, Oly was feeding nickels into a slot machine and Roger was feeding nickels to Oly.

Lydia said, “I told you not to give him money.”

Roger glanced at Shannon, then looked away and smiled. The smile and the look didn’t match up, as if he wanted to acknowledge Shannon’s entrance without seeming to see her; or to admit he’d seen her without looking at her; or maybe as a way to say he was happy she was there, while stressing his neutrality on the subject. To Shannon, it was a remarkably complicated way of not saying hello.

Roger said, “He’s up twenty-two dollars.”

Oly, by comparison, actually didn’t see or acknowledge or look at Shannon. His concentration was absolute—nickel to slot, wait for the
bing
,
nickel to slot, wait for the
bing
, no pause, even when he hit and a stream of nickels clattered into the steel bowl for Roger to collect. It was a slot machine specially built for gamblers in wheelchairs, with a hole underneath for legs and a button you pushed instead of a lever you pulled. A person can be quadriplegic and still play slots in the Las Vegas Airport.

Lydia said, “We can use the cash for gas.” She tapped Oly’s shoulder. “Come on, Mr. Fossil. Time to hit the highway.”

Without pausing his slot-feeding rhythm, Oly dropped his left hand and set the wheelchair brake.

Lydia leaned forward and popped the brake back off. “I know you’re not deaf, old man. Let’s roll.”

Oly was wearing painter overalls over a very old and very dirty T-shirt. He had flip-flops on his feet, and the toenails were thick as butter pats. His skin was the color of peed-on snow. Shannon hadn’t seen him since the summer before she started high school. She’d been with some local girls at the Jackson pool, sunbathing and watching boys, when one of her friends pointed out Oly, who was being lowered by mechanical chair into the therapeutic hot tub. In his bathing suit, he seemed, to Shannon, like the world’s oldest human back then, fifteen years ago. Now, he came across more as an animal than a person. An amphibian. Or maybe a newborn manatee.

Oly swiveled his head to Lydia. “I haven’t had so much entertainment in seventy-one years. I see no call to limit my pleasure.”

Roger said, “What happened seventy-one years ago?”

Oly didn’t move his head, but his eyes cut from Lydia to Roger. “The decent portion of my days ended.”

“That would be pertinent as hell if we gave a damn,” Lydia said. “But we don’t, and neither does anyone else in Nevada. So let’s move west. Do you need a potty before we load up?”

Oly’s mouth turned down into what Shannon saw as the nastiest face the nasty-looking man was capable of. He glared at Lydia.

Naturally, she deflected the glare. “Well, do you?”

Shannon said, “I do.”

***

The interstate west out of Las Vegas toward California is surreal, by any standards, but it’s surreal more in the lines of Dr. Seuss than Salvador Dali. It has all the charm of a rhinestone necklace on a camel. Depending on the time of day and day of the week, one direction will be bumper-to-bumper, jam-packed, while the other direction is a ghost road. The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, eastbound traffic coming from Los Angeles was a blood clot—stop-and-go way the heck out an hour from the nearest exit ramp, wrecks every twenty miles, overheated breakdowns cluttering the shoulder—while the westbound lanes were nearly empty of cars and light on trucks.

The landscape is second-rate. I’ve driven I-15 twice over the years and found the desert lacking both times. There are no trees, which normally I would find interesting, but that stretch of road isn’t raw enough or flat enough or even empty enough to evoke awe, not like Death Valley to the north or the Mojave to the south. It feels like a huge vacant lot. Common practice in the West is to change a baby in the backseat of a traveling car, then throw the soiled diaper out the window. Nevada should proclaim the dirty disposable diaper as its state flower.

A hundred yards out there, past the human trash and disruption, the landscape turns movie set. You expect to see a column of cavalry topping the mesa or a crusty prospector with an overloaded burro named Betsy.

Roger had driven all Friday night, to Mesquite on the Nevada border, while Lydia curled in the backseat and Oly fell into an old-age trance with his mouth open like a dying bird. In Mesquite, Lydia loaded up on coffee and took over while Roger dozed. Oly spread a Chevron map of the Western United States open on his lap. He seemed to be following their progress, but it was hard to tell. He may have been using it as a blanket.

After Vegas, Shannon joined Roger in the backseat. Roger, on the passenger side, twisted his key ring between his fingers and stared off at the desert. Roger had an amazing key ring. There must have been twenty-five keys strung on a leather thong. Lord knows what locks they went to.

Shannon, behind Lydia, stared at the back of the driver’s seat, waiting for the last suburbs of Vegas to die out before lighting into Roger. Shannon had the highest hopes that a new chapter of her life was about to begin. She was sick and disgusted with the old chapter. The approach she decided to take was to put Roger on the defensive and then to sweep in for the maiming.

She said, “You had relations with Eden Rae.”

It wasn’t a question, so Roger didn’t answer. He looked from the diaper-littered desert to Shannon. He’d spent so much of his time imagining her, seeing the actual Shannon felt dream-like. There was a separation between Roger and himself.

“I spoke to Eden Rae this morning,” Shannon said. “Her father came to get her, and we talked before she left.”

Roger tried moving the conversation away from relations. “She claims her father is the biggest pinhead on the planet.”

“I don’t know about biggest on the planet, but he’s top ten, anyway. The jerk managed to insult Dad and Gilia and everyone else.”

Roger twisted the key ring into a figure eight, then turned it inside out. He didn’t know what to say. He could tell Shannon expected a reaction, but he didn’t know what. He would gladly have told her what she wanted to hear, if only he knew what that was.

Shannon said, “Eden Rae told me all about you.”

Roger forced himself out of the dream state. If he didn’t treat this conversation as real, it might end badly. “She doesn’t know all about me. By next week, she’ll forget my name.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“The girls say they’ll stay in touch, but no one ever has.”

Shannon’s eyes bored into Roger’s. She was going for the tendon. “Eden Rae told me you have sexual relations with every girl at the Home for Unwed Mothers.”

The front seat had grown silent, more silent than before, when neither Lydia nor Oly had been talking. It was as if both were holding their breaths. Even Oly seemed alert.

Roger said, “That’s not true.”

Shannon said, “Which part?”

“I don’t sleep with all of them.”

“How many pregnant girls have you slept with?”

Roger pulled his bandanna low over his eyes. Whenever he looked straight into Shannon’s eyes, he lost concentration. This didn’t feel like the proper time to lose concentration.

Shannon said, “I’ve noticed whenever you’re uncomfortable, you hide behind that bandanna. Give it to me.”

“What?”

“Give me the bandanna so we may continue this conversation.”

Sheepishly, Roger pulled the bandanna forward, off his head. He hadn’t been in public without it in quite a while, and handing it to Shannon made him even more exposed than he already was.

Shannon rolled her window down and threw the bandanna out. Roger twisted to watch it flap along the highway.

“Why did you do that?”

She rolled the window back up. “So we can visit without distraction. Now, tell me how many pregnant girls have you slept with.”

Roger watched in horror as the bandanna blew into the ditch, where it lay looking more like a diaper with blood on it than tie-dyed headgear.

Shannon said, “Roger.”

He turned back to her. “I’ve always thought it was bad manners to count.”

Shannon nodded. That statement put him in a class above most of her former lovers. Hell, it put him in a class above her. She knew exactly how many men she’d slept with. “Would you say you’ve had sex with half the girls who came to the Home since you started living there?”

Roger thought. It was difficult without the familiar pressure on his forehead. He felt disoriented. “I wouldn’t say that, no.”

“Thirty percent?”

Roger did some quick math. “Twenty-five, maybe. But I wouldn’t normally say it out loud, even if it’s true.”

“Twenty-five percent or twenty-five girls?”

“You were asking about percents. I don’t count girls.”

“But you do count percents.”

“I don’t count percents. You asked me for an estimate, and I told you. It seemed more honest than not counting and acting like I didn’t know.”

Shannon broke away from staring at Roger and looked off the side of the highway. They were coming to the Nevada–California border. Buffalo Bill’s and Whiskey Pete’s appeared on either side of the interstate like hallucinations in the desert. A roller coaster swept between the buildings. She could see children with their arms raised, screaming.

“Eden Rae said the girls weren’t afraid of sleeping with you, because you’re in love with me.”

Roger felt a wave of nausea. He disguised it well. He had years of training in disguising fear-induced nausea.

Shannon plowed on. “She said it made you safe. The girls had been sexually active before pregnancy, and they didn’t want to stop. They chose you because you wouldn’t get attached and become a messy entanglement, because of me.”

Roger considered this line of logic as Lydia drove along the banks of a dry lake. There wasn’t a blade of grass out there. All he saw were a couple of what looked like sailboats made out of soapbox derby carts on spidery wheels. None of the girls had ever said why they came to him. They just came.