“Gus tells me the slut ran out. Congratulations, sugar booger.”
‘‘Maurey, my marriage just blew up. That should call for a little sympathy.”
Pause. “Your marriage was the family joke, Sam. Both your marriages. Nobody’s going to fake sympathy when they blow up.”
“That’s what Gus said.”
“How much did she take with her?”
“The 240Z and my baseball card collection. Me Maw’s jewelry, but I guess I gave her that anyway.”
“You gave her your dead grandmother’s jewelry?”
“We were playing ‘How much do you love me?’ one night in bed. She said ‘Do you love me enough to give me everything you own?’ and I said ‘Yes.’”
“Sam.”
“It was foreplay. I didn’t mean her to take me literally.”
Maurey was quiet a few moments, obviously disgusted. “How’s my baby?”
There was news, but I wasn’t certain how to break it. “I think Shannon lost her virginity. She didn’t come home Friday night.”
“Sam, Shannon lost her virginity after a Carolina-Duke game two years ago.”
I almost dropped the phone. “How do you know?”
“She told me. She bet her virginity on Duke and lost. She was planning to sleep with the geek anyway and figured if she did it on a bet there’d be no strings attached. Doesn’t that just sound like a daughter of ours?”
I looked from the Exercycle to a painting on the wall of some Indians killing a buffalo, then back to my hand on the phone—all those years of protecting my daughter from the rancid gender down the tubes. I muttered, “She’s so young.”
“She waited four years longer than we did.”
“And look how we turned out—maladjusted ambiverts unable to sustain the simplest relationships.”
“Ambiverts, my ass, my relationship is fine.” I shut up on that one. Maurey’s relationship with Pud Talbot was a sore point with us, so sore that when she first took him in, Maurey and I stopped speaking to each other for eight months.
In the silence, Maurey said, “Before you go off the deep end, could you spare a couple thousand? The drought burned half our grass and we’ll have to buy feed this winter.”
“You must think I’m made of money.”
Another sore point—my money. “You’re made of horseshit, Sam. God knows everyone here at the TM Ranch appreciates our allowance; we’re just tired of doing backflips to yank it out of you.”
I didn’t say anything. The first days after your marriage dies, people should cut a little slack. The women in my life don’t know the meaning of slack.
“I’m sorry,” Maurey said.
“I’m sorry too.” I listened to Maurey breathe, but she didn’t say anything more. “How many lost souls am I supporting this week?” I asked.
“Three, counting your mother. I’ve got a recovering junkie out haying with Hank, and an unwed mother who’s supposed to be teaching Auburn French, but so far all she’s done is cry. And Petey called, he’s coming in Wednesday. God knows why.”
“I thought Petey hated all things rural.” Petey is Maurey’s brother. He’s never much liked me and vice versa, although we keep it civil. I never called him a derogatory name, either to his face or back, but he once said I was a screaming heterosexual.
“All I know’s what the letter said—meet him at the airport Wednesday. I suppose you’ll be the next to drag your ass home. Pud wants to change our name to Lick Your Wounds Ranch.”
“I better stay put for now. Wanda might come back and she’d worry if I was gone.”
Maurey made a snort sound. “She’s a bitch, Sam. The woman doesn’t deserve to suck the mud off your sneakers.”
Back to the bike. Now I have two traumas to flee—my botched marriage and my daughter’s lost virginity.
To say that my life began with Shannon’s birth is not the overblown remark you might think. I was thirteen when Shannon was born, three weeks short of fourteen. How much that matters can happen to a person before his fourteenth birthday? Mostly I took care of my mother, Lydia, which is another thing I discovered when I reached what passes for adulthood. Parents are supposed to take care of children, not the other way around. Lydia told me it was normal for a child to cook meals and wash the clothes. How was I supposed to know different? She had me balancing her checkbook when I was ten years old—the ditz never wrote down dates and check numbers—and these days she complains continuously because I won’t let her handle money. I mean, good grief, already.
Lydia now runs the only feminist press in Wyoming. She’s stopped drinking and stopped smoking, and she jogs the county roads wearing a sweatshirt, tights, ninety-dollar sneakers, and a headband that, if you circle it from ear to ear, reads Men can be replaced with a banana.
Oothoon Press publishes books such as Mother Lied and The Castration Solution. Lydia’s authors call me, the one who pays their bills, a pig and a villain simply because I have a penis and most of the pigs and villains down through history have had penises. Hell, I don’t like the male sex any more than Lydia’s authors, only I make an exception of myself.
When Maurey gave me the Russell print of the Indians killing the buffalo, she said it reminded her of me. I’d recently ridden several days and several hundred miles directly into the scene, and I still didn’t get the connection. One Indian is shooting the buffalo with a rifle, and one Indian is shooting him with a bow and arrow, while a third waves a spear in the air and shouts Indian stuff. Meanwhile, the buffalo is goring the hell out of a fourth Indian, who is either dead or dying, and stomping the hell out of the fourth Indian’s white horse. The painting is dramatic, what with two animals and a human dying and three humans and an animal killing, and everyone caught up in your basic here and now.
After Maurey said Wanda was unworthy to suck the mud off my sneakers, I rode eighty miles, staring at her painting. I’ve never been one to get caught up in the here and now, myself. I can’t remember a single scene I’ve been in where one part of me wasn’t standing off to the side, figuring how to word it when I told the story to a woman, and conceptualizing her reaction, then my reaction to her reaction and so on until we wound up in bed or married or whatever. Call it the curse of the romantic writer—even the romantic writer of Young Adult sports novels. So far I have the temperament of Scott Fitzgerald and the following of Dizzy Dean. Reach out for an understanding of that one.
Did Maurey think of me as the Indians killing the buffalo? Or the buffalo itself? Maybe she was saying I’m the last of a dying breed, valiantly raging in a futile battle before ultimate death. That didn’t really sound like my Maurey. Or maybe I’m the dead or dying Indian who got himself reamed by his prey.
She’d more likely think of me as an Indian than a buffalo. I’m not bulky or hairy enough to compare to the buffalo. She probably thought of me as an Indian—wild and free and prone to running around without a shirt. Lydia’s boyfriend is an Indian. Hank Elkrunner does most of the actual labor at Maurey’s ranch. I don’t know how Hank puts up with my mother’s never-ending narcissism. Lydia passionately cares about the condition of her nails and the worldwide fight for feminist awareness, only she doesn’t put much stock on details in between, like family and friends.
Mostly Hank looks inscrutable and stays out at the ranch until he’s summoned to take care of her banana needs. Hank Elkrunner is the only male person I’ve ever been able to stomach for the long run. Shannon says my anti-male bias is the character flaw that dooms every aspect of my life, such as women. I don’t agree with her, but many hours of cranking an Exercycle while fleeing demons is a good time to question basic assumptions.