Lydia (40 page)

Lydia stood frozen, staring at the old man until Leroy grew impatient. “Move it or lose it, woman.”

Lydia turned over the next card. “Lydia.”

She moved on quickly. “Lydia.”

“Lydia.”

One card was left, with Lydia and Oly tied, and I’d voted for me. I didn’t know what Leroy planned in case of a tie—kill them both, I supposed, unless that screwed up his balance of nature as much as not killing anyone. Leroy’s spiritual logic was so convoluted, you’d have to be as nuts as he was to predict it. I scanned the pool area for a decorative rock or a loose brick. Anything blunt. The Paul’s backyard was clear of all weapons bigger than a coffee cup. There was an aluminum pole with a net on one end suitable for fishing leaves out of the pool. I didn’t see what good that could do me, even if I got hold of it before Leroy commenced firing.

Lydia looked around at Shannon and Roger. They were standing by the back door, Shannon’s hand clutching Roger’s arm like an anchor. Loren and Lana Sue were on my right, between the stone table and the pool. Zelda was up close to Leroy. Oly hadn’t moved from the edge of the pool. No one seemed on the verge of rushing the hot tub.

Lydia flipped over the last card. She studied a moment and said, “Lydia.” Then she folded all the cards together and slipped them into her back pocket.

“Wait a minute,” Loren said, at the same moment I said, “Bullshit!”

Roger said, “Let me see those cards.”

Lydia faced Leroy. “Your turn, asswipe.”

He shot her.

Shannon screamed, Maurey yelled, “
No!
”
I caught Lydia as she fell, and Lana Sue threw the CD player into the hot tub. There was a hard electrical
Pop
.
Leroy started to rise. His face twisted into a grin, and he died.

***

I lowered Lydia to the ground and held her head against my chest with her body across my lap and her legs sprawled on the grass. I’m not sure if I’d ever held her before, other than a quick, awkward hug. She seemed too light to be my mother. Leroy’d hit her in the sternum. There was a lot of blood. I clamped my cut hand over the hole in her chest, but it didn’t do any good.

Her eyes looked up at me, or past me—I couldn’t tell which. Her eyelids fluttered.

I said, “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I did.” She coughed a wad of blood. “I’m too vain to age with grace.”

I held her and cried. Maurey knelt down beside us. Then Shannon and Roger came in on the other side. Shannon arranged Lydia’s legs so they weren’t crumpled, but Lydia didn’t notice.

Maurey said, “Hold on. The ambulance is coming. You’ll be okay.”

Lydia almost laughed, but the laugh turned to a spasm of pain. After it passed, she said, “Maurey, you always were such a liar.”

After that, we were quiet. Lana Sue was talking on her cell phone. Oly rolled up to Lydia’s feet and looked down at her.

Lydia raised a hand to touch my face. She said, “Tell Hank.”

“What?”

Her eyes grew cloudy. Her hand lowered back to her side. She said again, “Tell Hank.”

Oly said, “I’ll take care of it.”

Then Lydia left me.

No one spoke for a while. Loren came up and touched my shoulder. He said, “Can I do anything?”

I said, “No.”

From the outer edge of the circle, I heard Zelda’s voice. “Would somebody take me home?”

Why do we treat those we love so much worse than those we don’t like? Lydia would starve before not tipping a waitress. She’d go back home if the alternative was parking in a handicapped slot, yet she lied to and browbeat the family she loved. The truth I can’t get around is this: Lydia slept with a stranger the night before seeing the husband she would rather die than live without. Maurey may know why. Or Oly. I cannot find a way of understanding the last day of my mother’s life.

For the past twenty-five years, whenever I’ve had a question I couldn’t answer, I’d write a hundred-thousand-word novel in which people acted out my problem, and by the finish of the book, the question was either answered, or it had vanished into the pages. But this time I’m way over my one hundred thousand words, and I’m no closer to understanding than I was back when I typed
I am that I am
. I still do not know the answer, and I still wish I did.

***

Hank’s parole came two months after Lydia died. He took a bus to Idaho Falls and I drove the van over to get him. He had no luggage. We drove back over Teton Pass, mostly in silence. He asked about a horse I wasn’t familiar with. He commented on how early the fireweed was out.

Hank had me drop him off at Haven House. He went in and talked to Oly for a couple of hours. Even as a novelist creating the parts where I wasn’t there, I can’t conceive of what they said to each other. Later that week, Hank disappeared up into the Bitterroots. The next spring, eight months later, Maurey went out at dawn to check on a foal, and Hank was in the pasture, fixing a head gate. He’s worked and lived at the TM Ranch since then.

A year after her death—Memorial Day 1994—Hank and I took Lydia’s ashes to the top of Miner Creek and turned her loose. Human ashes aren’t what you’d think, if you haven’t spread them before. They’re crunchy, with bits of bone mixed into the ash pack. I hadn’t expected to see pieces of Lydia when we dropped her into the creek. It brought her back all in a rush. I could hear her telling us we were doing it wrong.

You spread ashes downwind, you idiots
, she would have said.
You dickwads don’t piss against the wind. What makes you think you can scatter me that way?

Hank said this was the place he’d brought her on their first date. Lydia climbed off the snowmobile and fell through the ice rime, ankle-deep into the creek. He had to pull off her boots and warm her feet between his thighs. He’d been embarrassed no end to have the white city girl’s bare toes up against his crotch. Lydia laughed till tears froze to her cheeks.

I said, “You should have known she’d be trouble.”

Hank and I watched her ashes swirl in an eddy, and then gradually, they spread and disappeared downstream like sugar in a glass of iced tea.

He said, “I knew.”

***

Mary Beth and her family drove up from Albuquerque last summer so she could beg forgiveness for the kidnapping all those years ago. Lonnie and the girls went into Jackson to see the shoot-out while Mary Beth stayed at the ranch and wept. Maurey hugged her and said she wasn’t to blame for the awful trauma of Roger’s childhood; Roger patted her on the shoulder and assured her she didn’t cause his mother’s suicide.

I’m glad she didn’t ask me. I wouldn’t have been so nice.

***

Roger and Shannon moved into Lydia’s house in GroVont. He commutes up the river to Madonnaville five days a week. The Home for Unweds couldn’t make it without him. Shannon has discovered ceramics. Her dream is to own a tourist trap where she can sell pots and authentic Indian goods.

Three months after Shannon and Roger moved in together, Shannon announced to Maurey that the waiting period closed with a crash. Maurey asked me if I wanted to know what that meant and I said, “No.”

Christmas, they flew back to Santa Barbara and stayed a week with Lana Sue and Loren. Roger tells me he still has nightmares, but not nearly so often, and when he awakes after one, Shannon is there to hold him. He no longer fears uncontrollable suicide.

***

I wrote this book in his old cabin.

***

There never was an Oly Pedersen Day in GroVont. The week before he turned one hundred, Oly and Irene Dukakis ran off to live in Greece. I didn’t even know Oly had a passport. We had no clue as to where they were for a month or so, until Roger got a postcard with a picture of Delphi on the front. The back—in a scrawl like a bird scratching blood—read:

Irene and I are hitched. We would prefer cash to wedding gifts. Send money orders to…

and then came an address in Amfissa, Greece. I mailed him two hundred dollars, in Lydia’s name.

***

Last Mother’s Day—two years after Lydia got out of prison—Gilia and I took Esther to Yellowstone to look for Evangeline’s grave. We found it too, right where Oly said it would be. There’s a picnic area, now, on Nez Perce Creek. Her marker sits thirty yards or so beyond the bathrooms. The park service has placed a low pipe fence around the site, so kids won’t climb on the stone, I guess. I can’t think of any other reason.

If you stand with your back to the picnic tables and face the Firehole, the view must be close to what Oly saw seventy years ago—the blooming balsamroot and larkspur, ravens soaring the updraft, juncos in the sage. It helps that our visit came within a week of the funeral date. The similarities were easy to see.

The stone is a yellow-white slab, not marble, maybe quartz. Rock identification always has been a flaw in my nature lore skills. It’s that rock from over by Canyon that gave Yellowstone its name. The words read

Evangeline Pedersen

July 10, 1902–May 15, 1924

Our Angel Has Flown

Gilia said, “That sounds just like Oly.”

“The man is a born poet,” I said. “Or was. He’d be pushing one hundred and two now, if he’s still alive.”

“He’s still alive,” Gilia said. “That old blowhard is unkillable.”

Gilia took photographs of the grave and the surrounding land, so when I wrote this scene I wouldn’t screw it up while I worked out the relationship of beauty to death and how one meant nothing without the other. Esther did cartwheels around the fence. Cartwheels are her new method of getting from place to place. She doesn’t walk, run, or skip much these days. She cartwheels. It’s a skill she picked up in Mighty Mite Gymnastics. As she cartwheeled around the circle, Esther sang a song in which a woman swallows a fly and tries to figure why. It wasn’t one Lydia taught me. I don’t remember Lydia teaching me any songs when I was young.

My daughter was so heartbreakingly alive I gave up on the deep thoughts to watch her circle the grave. As Lydia pointed out more times than I wanted to hear—for a person who thinks deep thoughts for a living, I’m not very good at it. I don’t have the discipline. I’d rather watch my daughter, or a cloud, or listen to running water. I start out with a thought chain and end up with white noise.

With each loop, Esther’s dark hair brushed the dirt, and sooner or later one of her palms was going to come down on a sharp rock. I knew I should say something, but I kept putting it off. Gilia was more interested in photography than parenting. The day was too nice to criticize. My women were happy; therefore, I was happy.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You ought to stop that before you get hurt.”

Esther glanced over to see how serious I was, and decided I wasn’t.

“Her hair is getting dirty,” I said.

Gilia’s next line would normally have been
So what?
but this time it was so obvious she didn’t bother to say it out loud. Instead she shifted closer to me, so our shoulders were touching as we watched our daughter cavort. The things that are simple to other people—sunlight on skin, spring air, family close by—floor me when I suddenly recognize their value. I have trouble breathing.

Esther yelped and twisted her arm back to avoid touching elk scat, and she went over backward in a crash. She sat on the ground, legs akimbo, eyes flashing, glaring at me.

“That was your fault,” she said.

I laughed. Big mistake.

“
Daddy. Don’t laugh at me!
”

“I wasn’t laughing at you. I was thinking how much you’re growing up like your Grandmother Lydia.”

Gilia socked me hard on the upper arm. “Good Lord, don’t say that.”

“Why not? Lydia was my mother.”

“I wouldn’t brag, if I were you.”

Esther stood up and brushed sage and elk scat off her shorts. “I want nachos.”

I said, “Okay.”

With no more thoughts of death and dying, the three of us loaded into the Madonnaville van and drove off in search of nachos. Lydia would have approved.

You Yellowstone sticklers will notice I switched the Midway Geyser Basin for Fountain Flats. There is a good reason for this. Fountain sounds better in a sentence than Midway. Try it. Other than that, the history and geography are more or less correct, at least as Sam and Oly would have remembered them.

Much of this book was written in Pearl Street Bagels and the Center for the Arts. I wish to thank the fine folks at both for their patience while I lived in one world and existed in another.

Valley Books, as always, kept me going.

My family gave me time, space, and optimism.

Todd Stocke and Flip Brophy had the faith.

Thanks to the Sandlinistas, especially Curt Pasisz and Army and Aero Feth. You too can join at timsandlin.com.

I thank the board of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, particularly Nicole Burdick and Linda Hazen.

I have now been with Maurey and Sam through four novels, two movies, and twenty-seven years. My loved ones say that’s enough. Even though, when pushed in a corner, I will admit they aren’t real, I still want to thank those two for giving me their travails and deepest needs. It’s been more fun than folks who only live one life can imagine.

Reviewers have variously compared Tim Sandlin to Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, Larry McMurtry, Joseph Heller, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen, and a few other writers you’ve probably heard of. He has published nine novels and a book of columns. He wrote eleven screenplays for hire, two of which have been made into movies. He used to write reviews for the
New York Times Book Review
but was fired for excessive praise. He lives with his family in Jackson, Wyoming, where he is director of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference. His Sandlinistas follow him at
www.timsandlin.com
.