Western Swing (2 page)

The summer I turned fourteen, I decided dogs and cats were agents of God, angels who spied on us and reported unclean thoughts and screwups to the man up top. Actually, dogs reported to cats, who spoke directly to God. Dogs can't talk to God. Just cats.

The episode was discovered when I attached notes to Him onto neighborhood dog and cat collars.
I know what you're doing, but it's okay. You can trust me not to tell anyone. Please let me go.

Neighbors complained to Mom and my stepdad, who sent me to a county extension analyst, who said the problem was artificial flavors and coloring and if I ate better I still wouldn't be happy, but at least I wouldn't bother anyone.

We—Lana Sue and I—own two dogs and two cats now: Rocky, Josie, Fitz, and Zelda. I still won't do anything in front of the animals that I don't want God or Lana Sue to know about.

• • •

My mother is a beehive hairdo cocktail waitress in a jukebox and bingo club in Victoria, Texas. She wears fake gold earrings shaped like the Texas A&M logo. She keeps Coronet facial tissues between the cups in her bra. She chews three sticks of Trident at once and fries everything she eats.

Mom royally botched the job of raising me and my two brothers. Patrick grew into a real estate magnate in Corpus Christi. He's a swamp drainer. Garret is a Jesus freak serving ten to twenty-five on a heroin charge in the Georgia State pen in Reidsville. There was also a baby sister, Kathy, who got herself killed by a Texas Ranger during a race riot in Houston. They caught her looting a Woolworth's department store. She died with her arms full of Barbie dolls.

My stepfather, Don, works on an offshore rig in the Gulf, bowls in the low 200s, and has worn white socks every day of his life. He sleeps in the same underwear he bowls in. Mom told me my real dad was an evangelist for the Southern Ministry, but I don't believe her. I doubt if she knew.

If I ever sell another book, I'm going to a plastic surgeon to have my navel smoothed over. I don't want any reminders that I was ever connected to that woman.

• • •

Writing books is what I do—or did. Lately, I've been thinking there may be more to life than pretending I'm somebody else. In ten years of almost daily typing I sold two formula Westerns and one of those sentimental novels where you make the readers like a character, then you kill him. After I met Lana Sue, I wrote a vaguely true, mostly lies book called
The Yeast Infection.
All the carefully veiled characters recognized themselves and I found myself embroiled in two lawsuits and a fistfight. I won the lawsuits. Would have won the fistfight, but Jimmy Stewart doesn't hit women.

Movie rights sold, amazingly enough, and Lana Sue and I suddenly arrived in Temporary Fat City. Lana Sue'd been raised upper tax bracket, so she handled it okay. I went nuts—Super Bowl tickets, eighty-dollar bottles of sherry, Nautilus machines, personalized license plates on the Chevelle. After a quick trip to Carano, Italy, in search of Max Brand's first grave—he had two—I still maintained enough cash to support us without hourly work at least through the summer.

A summer in Jackson Hole without money thoughts is the gift of a lifetime and gifts should not be pissed away on idleness. I decided that in order to stay with Lana Sue I had to resolve my past and in order to do that I had to give up Buggie.

Lana Sue said, “Loren, no disembodied voice up in the mountains is waiting to tell you where Buggie is.”

“I'll force it out of him.”

“Out of who?”

“Whoever's up there.”

“Wave bye-bye, Loren, 'cause I won't be here when you come back down.”

Lana Sue's daddy was a gynecologist and her grandma committed suicide. Her former husband was a country music promoter who used to fake epileptic fits whenever she wouldn't go down on him, so Lana Sue was well acquainted with insanity before she came to me and she doesn't care to get involved with purposeful psychosis.

“You're getting heavy,” she said.

“Don't you ever wonder about the purpose of life?”

“I wonder about the price of Tony Lamas or how many calories are in frozen yogurt. The purpose of life doesn't matter, Loren.”

“Does to me.”

As America goes lightweight—light beer, light cigarettes, light margarine—being “heavy” is the last great sin. It replaced saying “fuck” on television.

Lana Sue sang in one of her hub's bands before I spirited her away to the Wyoming wilderness. She wasn't good enough to be in the band without balling somebody, and she knew it, and the husband, Ace, reminded her of this fact every night.

Ace said, “You could never be in this band if you weren't screwing me,” which made her resent him, naturally. Ace is the title character in
The Yeast Infection.
I came, fell into the picture, and told her I wouldn't give her anything at all if she slept with me, so she did. I lied, though, because after the last book came out, we got our picture in the
Casper Star Tribune's
Sunday Supplement. I have the picture in a frame on my desk. Lana Sue and I are standing by the greenhouse, petting our dog, Rocky, who has just ripped the heart out of a marmot that's not in the picture. Lana Sue is wearing a dark wool shirt and tight jeans. Her hair is the best part of the picture. I love Lana Sue's hair.

My face looks like I just woke up with a bad schnapps hangover. The back of my jeans hangs down loose was if my ass has been surgically removed. Even in the grainy newspaper picture, my glasses are noticeably dirty. The caption says Lana Sue and I are a “vibrant young Wyoming couple.” Lana Sue is vibrant. I don't label well.

• • •

I fell in love with Lana Sue because she fell in love with me. Also, because she sings on the toilet. The morning after our first night, I woke up fuzzy and heard the chorus of “Jambalaya” coming from the bathroom. The song is a list of interesting Louisiana foods. Hank Williams wrote it.

Figuring it was safe, I did my usual blind morning stumble into the can and there sat a beautiful woman, the beautiful woman, my adolescent fantasy woman, with panties around her ankles.

“Nobody sings on the toilet,” I said.

“I do.”

“You're supposed to sing in the shower.”

“I sing anywhere I want.”

“My God.” I backed out, closed the door, and leaned my forehead on the cool paint of the frame. Seven-thirty on a Sunday morning and she's singing Hank Williams on the crapper. I decided to marry her and have children.

• • •

Lana Sue is the most self-confident person I've ever known. She's so smooth and…adaptable. And cheerful—how many cheerful people do you meet who aren't unrealistic to the point of retarded?

More remarkable than that, Lana Sue thinks I'm “hot stuff.” She said so. She said I'm a prize she got for not going nuts or settling for anything less. Isn't that remarkable, a woman of balance and perspective, not to mention beautiful as the sun rising over the Tetons, swept off her feet by a manic-depressive soul searcher with no ass? There's no accounting for tastes.

The only thing that worries me is, Lana Sue seems too good to be true, and too good to be true almost always isn't—true. But so far, up until I obsessed out on this search, Lana Sue has walked that narrow writer's wife line between taking my artistic temperament seriously and treating me like a learning-deficient cousin. She even listens with a straight face when I babble on about emanations from dead novelists.

“I read Flannery O'Connor a chapter of Erica Jong and she rolled over in her grave,” I said, and Lana Sue answered, “Uh-huh,” and not a question about how I knew without digging her up.

Or one day I said, “Scott Fitzgerald is calling. He wants to explain the ending of
The Last Tycoon
,”
and Lana Sue answered, “Take the Toyota, it's gassed up.”

Nine days later when I pulled back in the driveway, she asked, “What's the ending?” and didn't laugh or anything when I told her Scott changed his mind. God only knows the woman was patient. She put up with an unholy amount of metaphysical fufaw before driving out of my life.

• • •

How long? Four days ago, five maybe, the day before Lana Sue left, I sat out by the creek behind our cabin, inspecting minute plant life. The whole week had been spent either up on a ridge top screaming, “
Behold, the Universe
,” or down on my hands and knees, gaping in amazement at the infinite detail of a spider's front legs. My blind spot was the middle view—people, trees.

An aspen leaf with a tiny bug in it fell into my hands. The bug had burrowed a maze around the inside of the leaf, eating every bit of chlorophyll, leaving behind a sort of Pac-Man game with tracers. He had traveled as extensively in one leaf as anyone could ever hope to.

“Neat,” I said. I like to share special things with Lana Sue. That's one reason I live with her. So, holding the leaf gently in my palm, I walked into the cabin.

“Look what I found,” I said.

Lana Sue sat at the kitchen table. Her hair wasn't as wavy as usual. Maybe it was dirty, I don't know. She had on a white T-shirt and a pair of shorts that made her legs look heavy. She held a teaspoon with her fist like a kid would and she was eating sugar straight from the bowl.

I must have surprised her because Lana Sue jerked and her face wasn't her at all. It was red and torn-looking, a cross between panic and despair, nothing like she ever looked before.

“Yuck,” I said. “You're eating white sugar.”

The spoon sailed across the room and bounced off my chest. Lana Sue ran out the front door, crying.

Lana Sue never cries. I didn't think tears were in her. I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, next to the wood stove, looking at the design in the yellow leaf. The next day, she left.

I slithered around the willows for an hour or so, camouflaging myself as a snake. At first I heaved rocks way upstream in hopes of drawing fire, but nothing came of it. No shots, no sounds other than the whisper in the creek—the gunman seemed to have disappeared. Or never existed. Truly bizarre events always seem unreal afterwards, especially if you haven't eaten in three days, so I finally wound up creeping back to the empty Coleman fuel can just to prove I wasn't lost in a dream sequence.

It was real all right. The chokecherry still smoked. My nose caught a wet seaweed odor, not something you'd imagine on your own.

The forest line on both sides of the coulee showed no signs of a sniper. Up on the ridge I'd come down, a deer lowered her head, then raised it, chewing, calmly looking down at me—a standard all-clear signal to any Max Brand reader. I stood up for a better view. The deer was pretty, all innocent and brown and noble, the way wild animals are supposed to be. She stared at me with soft, wet doe-eyes. If I'd had my Ruger I could have nailed her dead.

One thing I decided for certain: Starvation is for people who don't have food. Half this country is fasting for health or religious purposes, and I saw no reason why I should follow the crowd. If thousands of rich, beautiful Californians can't find God on clear juice and bottled water, I wasn't going to find him hungry. I'm too skinny to miss a meal.

• • •

Sunday morning, before setting out on my Quest, I drove to the Safeway in Jackson and drifted up and down the aisles, admiring the food, saying my good-byes, so to speak. Some was canned, some frozen, some more chemicals than dead plant or animal matter, but it was all admirable. Like freedom or electricity or legs, no one appreciates food who hasn't unwillingly gone without it.

I pushed a basket up and down the maze of aisles, searching for the perfect post-Vision snack, something light but with nutrition, something that would jump-start my empty system. Cookies lacked substance, jerky was too much, I don't really care for fresh fruit.

Then I saw the red and clear cellophane of the Fig Newton display and Divine Inspiration said, “
Look no more
.” My Divine Inspiration sounds like the guy who used to narrate the Disney nature flicks, the voice of a northeast Texan on Darvons.

He also told me to pick up a Spell-Write notebook and two Bic Clics. With my memory what it's been lately, God might tell me what happens after we die and I'd forget.

At the checkout counter, I saw a forty-eight-point Gothic headline on the
National Star,
SCIENTISTS FIND DEFINITE PROOF OF LIFE AFTER DEATH. I showed the checker girl.

“How about that,” she said.

“Do you believe it?”

“Naw, if the proof was definite, it'd be in
USA Today
.”

“I suppose so.”

• • •

My daypack is brown nylon with green strings and leather stitched along the bottom. It has two pockets, the big one at the top and a flat one on the back for easy access. A pair of straps hang down for securing my 100 percent fiberfill sleeping bag. I like my daypack. I bought it when I sold the first Western.

Chest heaving like an old man, sweat trickling down my forehead draining dirt into my eyes, I untied the cord around the top pocket and dumped all my stuff on the ground. An army canteen landed on top of the pile and it didn't take long to sort out the Fig Newtons.

I sat next to the empty pack and twisted open the canteen top. As I sucked down water, a gray jay glided in and landed on two hops about eight feet up the trail.

“Hello,” I said.

The jay cocked its head right and hopped toward me.

“How's your karmatic input-output ratio?” I asked the jay. Inside the cellophane wrapper, two lines of fig-filled pastry lay sealed in more cellophane. “Want some Fig Newton? I bet you never ate a fig.” The jay hopped a couple hops closer.

“Watch for seeds.” I stuck a whole cookie in my mouth, tore another one in half, and threw one of the halves at the jay—almost caught him in the beak. He flew into a tree and made a shrill “
Jeeah, jeeah
”
sound.

“What's the problem?” I threw the other half farther off the trail. The Fig Newton tasted good, so I had another and washed it down with canteen water. Since I hadn't eaten in three days and my stomach felt odd, I figured it wouldn't be wise to stuff myself right off. Four would be the limit now, then four more later.

The jay flew back and hopped to the farthest piece of Fig Newton. He pecked at it a couple times, then picked up the whole chunk with his bill and flew into a different tree.

Sitting up on my knees, I arranged all the stuff in a line. Normally, whatever Loren carried would have been whatever Lana Sue packed, but this time I was pretty sure he put the things in the daypack himself. Lana Sue hadn't been in the mood. The only other possibility was Marcie VanHorn, but that didn't seem likely because my relationship with her hadn't reached the helpless stage yet. I generally have to sleep with a woman before she starts treating me like a child.

The gray jay swooped down and landed next to the other half Newton. I watched him a minute while chewing another one myself. By then I'd lost count and couldn't remember if I'd eaten three or four, so I ate two more.

Okay—far left of the lineup. Neat's-foot oil. That showed Loren wasn't particularly practical because I wore running shoes—Adidas three stripers. The bottle had a picture of a bearded man on the front. I assumed he was Mr. Neat.

Two fishing lures. One green and white, the other red and white with an imprint of a devil figure stamped on the gold back.

Toilet paper. Good sign. Toothbrush—red, but no toothpaste. The possibility began to dawn on me that, as Loren walked out of the cabin, he picked up the old daypack and put it, and whatever happened to be in it, on his back.

Three paperback books.
Black Elk Speaks, Panama
by Tom McGuane, and a phone directory for all the Holiday Inns in America. Waiting for a sign, I flipped through
Panama,
stopped and read an italicized sentence.
This time the pus is everywhere.

Because of its bugles and groans, the Sioux Indians thought the elk was the sex animal. In their religion, the color black symbolized wisdom. Black Elk literally translates as Wise Fuck. I'd love to publish a book under that pen name:
Wise Fuck Speaks.
It'd be a lock for a book club selection.

I found no message in the Holiday Inn directory. There was also a comic book put out by the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Spell-Write spiral notebook. The comic book showed a sinner who was outraged at waking up and finding himself in Hell. The flames looked tacky and lacked credibility. The sinner hoped to do life over again from the perspective of knowing what Hell was like, but God, or a Jehovah's Witness spokesman, said, “Nope, you should have listened when I knocked on your door.” All God's lines were footnoted.

I flipped open the notebook and read,
Being happy is nicer,
and
Outer circumstances are irrelevant to inner peace.
On the second page it said,
Nothing matters but loss
and
Love is a train. It may be jumped, but not chased.

All these sayings were in my handwriting, but someone else must have written them because I don't remember and, if I'm ever deep in a clairvoyant trance, I hope I can do better than that. I didn't starve, drive myself manic, and lose Lana Sue to come up with
Being happy is nicer.

I pulled a pen from my back pocket and, turning to page 3, wrote,
Nothing worth knowing can be expressed in words.

To the notebook's right lay a USGS quadmap of Sleeping Indian Mountain. This was the most important piece of evidence yet because, hopefully, I was squatting somewhere on the backside of the Sleeping Indian, and if so, Loren had planned ahead. Together with the toilet paper, the map showed foresight.

I tore off a piece of Fig Newton and threw it to the gray jay. Slipping the rest into my mouth, I continued the inventory: Boy Scout knife, three blades—long, short, and can opener. Matches wrapped in a plastic bag. A tiny pencil sharpener shaped like the Washington Monument. An unopened letter from Kearney, Nebraska—Christmas seal on the back. A plastic first aid kit—empty. An army canteen—metal liner with a green cloth cover, U.S. ARMY stenciled on one side, DO NOT HOLD NEAR FLAME on the other. A card for a drug rehabilitation clinic in Houston. A phone number on a slip of yellow-lined paper—no name or identifying characteristic. An aspirin. A blue Trojan-Enz prophylactic.

Lana Sue was protected by a copper coil, which makes me wonder what Loren had in mind.

A Sierra Club cup. And last, on the far right of this mess, one row of a double-row pack of Fig Newtons. What did it all mean? When you're on a Search everything means something. There's no such thing as a medium without a message.

I opened the letter from Kearney, Nebraska.

Dear Stoolhead,
it read.

I spent $4.95 on that book of yours,
Disappearance
, and I want my money back. You should be in jail. You're so smug, so frigging perfect. You should be sent to Russia. I hope your father is ashamed.

I hate you,

Patsy Holt

I tried to picture Patsy Holt. I decided she was fifty-six and parted her iron-black hair down the middle and ate frozen dinners every night. Probably drank buttermilk by the gallon. Maybe I should move to Nebraska and meet her and not tell her who I am. We could fall in love and have oral sex orgasms and later, after we married, I'd pull out the letter and we'd have a big laugh.

The jay cried “
Jeeah
” as the sun dipped behind a cloud. An awful lot of clouds had drifted in while I was wallowing around the willow thicket. The breeze on my face suddenly felt cooler. Starting on the right, I began stuffing items into the daypack. I was sure Loren's—my—crux lay in that pile of junk somewhere, but it was beyond me to figure where. He carried an unneeded rubber and wasn't popular in Nebraska. Not much to go on when the goal is perfect truth.

Time to move up the mountain. Packed, fed, and anxious to hit the trail, I stood on the side of the coulee to look one last time at the burned chokecherry next to the bubbling creek. It was real. I wasn't paranoid.

• • •

Confession time. I have this semidisgusting personality flaw in that, at times, many times, I act stupider than I am. For years I blamed the habit on Mom—as she took my clunkiness for granted, I grew into it—but Mom's over fifteen years back down the road so the rationale should have petered out by now.

My ignorance of the unused rubber is just the sort of false innocence that drives Lana Sue nuts. I know damn well the intentions of that condom—Marcie VanHorn. I'd like a witness here that the offending item lay snuggled in my daypack, still sealed in aluminum foil. Although unfulfillment won't help much if Lana Sue catches on. She's as likely to kick ass over what I wanted to do as what I did.

Marcie VanHorn and her father, Lee, are our closest neighbors. They live a half mile down the town road in a barn they've converted into a house next to a house they've converted into a barn. Marcie is a winner. At sixteen, with a ripe body, high energy, and a trust fund, what could you expect? She's the image of those teenage girls in the JC Penney catalog who model shortie nighties in poses of slumber-party pillow fights—tight butt, long legs, small breasts, eyes that challenge.

Things would have remained totally theoretical if Lee VanHorn hadn't organized a welcome-to-the-valley pack trip the summer we moved to Jackson Hole. Lana Sue hated her horse, didn't like the mosquitoes, and missed her cigarettes, all of which got taken out on me. Meanwhile, Marcie read
Yeast Infection
,
bought the sensitive-poet-at-heart inference, and fell into instant, if temporary, adoration. I eat up adoration.

Even then, things could have stayed on a level of a guilt-inducing wet dream, but the second night out, Lana Sue didn't hobble the hated horse properly and he gimped off up the canyon. Lee discovered the escape and he and Lana Sue gave chase, which left Marcie and me tending the fire. There, in the orange flicker of the campsite, the little hardbody offered herself to me.

Side by side, we sat on stumps, staring into the burning coals. Marcie touched my hand with fingers hot from holding a cup of fresh-made instant cocoa. “Virginity is too big a deal,” she said. “It's awful pressure, but I can't see cracking it with a boy from school. He might get all hung up.”

I sipped chocolate with my free hand. “I see your problem, Marcie.”

“I need an older man, someone experienced, who would be gentle and teaching, then afterwards, not bother me anymore.”

“Maybe if we think hard, we'll come up with someone.” False stupidity again. I knew Marcie's bottom line.

She looked at me with those pale, pale eyes and that blossoming sixteen-year-old body. “Will you make love to me, Loren?”

I sipped and stared into the fire. She was a child, Lana Sue and I had only been married two months, Lee had a room full of guns and every right to use one. But then, look at the trust in her eyes and the promise in those tangerine breasts. Yes or no, I would live to regret the answer.

“No.”

Marcie sighed. “Wish we had some schnapps for the chocolate.”

“Not that I wouldn't be honored. Maybe someday, after I've been married longer.”

She smiled. “You know where I live.”

Two years later, ten minutes after Lana Sue called the marriage quits, I grabbed fifty cents off her bureau and drove the Chevelle to the Cowboy Joe Service Station MEN'S room.