Sorrow Floats (12 page)

Lloyd blinked. “I’ve heard about this ranch. The owner has a fetish with predator control.”

Less than a mile later the death-on-a-stick thing started up on the left side, too. Ranch kids see death often, so they don’t have the romantic Bambi-Daffy Duck notions of city kids, and you don’t marry into a family of taxidermists if you tend to be squeamish, but this was disgusting. Mile after mile of rotting corpses. Some posts had two animals of different species, some little more than a picked-over skeleton. At first it was only distasteful, but as the minutes passed and the dead flashed by faster than white lines on the highway, I swung from nauseous to scared.

A great iron arch with the Double Aught brand in the middle marked the main ranch entrance. On each side of the brand two coyotes hung by the neck from hangman’s noose knots.

“I’m going to cut them down,” I said.

“They’ll just kill more to replace them,” Lloyd said.

“The right thing to do would be to cut them down.” I wanted to stop, I tried to stop, but we were already by. The coyotes retreated into the rearview mirror, farther and farther away. I wanted to swing around and go back. I meant to, but the upshot of the deal is I didn’t.

“There are some sick people in the world,” Lloyd said.

“Sick people in Texas. They’d never get away with this in Wyoming.”

Lloyd looked at me with sad eyes. “They get away with it everywhere. Nothing changes except in degrees.”

I didn’t get it. Lloyd probably had in mind a deep symbolic lesson about the state of the world. If so, he was too profound for me. All I saw was two lines of slaughtered animals leading into the horizon. Far as I’m concerned, dead stuff is dead stuff. Doesn’t symbolize squat.

I glanced back at Shane to see why he wasn’t relating the scene to some perverse woman he knew in his youth, but he had the map spread on his lap and hadn’t even looked up. Too busy figuring where he was going to see where he was.

Lloyd rubbed his hand on his overalls leg. The material on the right thigh was shiny and soft from all that rubbing. “My father was an alcoholic,” he said, “and his father before him. It generally runs in families.”

“None of the Pierce family has ever been alcoholics,” I said.

“Until you.”

“I’m not an alcoholic.” The north end of the Texas Panhandle must be the most bizarre country on Earth. All flat and scorched, makes you feel like a ladybug stuck on a dirty burger joint grill. A foreground full of rotting animals made the outlook disorienting. What was I doing outside Jackson Hole?

Lloyd went on in an inflectionless voice. “Grandfather Abe volunteered for World War One. In New York City, the night before he was supposed to ship out, he got so drunk that he missed his boat. The army gave him two months in the stockade, but Germans torpedoed the troop ship he should have been on and twelve hundred soldiers died.”

“There’s one hangover he won’t regret.”

We reached another
Double Aught
billboard, and the parade of corpses finally came to an end, replaced by a view of cattle grazing around oil pumps and stock ponds.

Pissed me off. “How can my ranch compete with these peckerheads? They’ve got year-round grass and money pouring out of the ground.”

Lloyd wasn’t listening. “Old Abe stayed polluted most of the next forty-five years. In 1959 he drove his truck off an overpass in L.A., landed smack on a woman and two children in a station wagon.”

“Dad bought Mom a station wagon in 1959—army green with wood trim. Petey and I pretended it was a fort.”

“The mother lost her spleen, one lung, and her eyesight. Abe broke his arm. He still had a fifth between his legs when they cut him out of the wreck.”

The Dalhart silos showed up on the horizon. Made the town appear as a thriving city off across a sea of winter wheat. I had to ask the question, even though I knew the answer and knew Lloyd was telling the story because he wanted to change me.

“What happened to the children?”

“Dead as those coyotes back there. They were so squished their daddy couldn’t separate out the parts to bury them in two caskets.” Lloyd rubbed some more. “Abe lost his driver’s license.”

The deal was a gyp. People were all the time telling me grisly tales of alcoholics accidentally killing kids and swamping themselves with guilt. Why tell me? I wasn’t an alcoholic, and I sure as hell didn’t drive drunk.

“If Abe hadn’t gotten soused in 1914, I wouldn’t be alive today,” Lloyd said, “but that family in L.A. would be.”

“What you’re saying is God moves in mysterious ways.”

Lloyd’s head snapped back and the cloudy look in his eyes went sharp. It was an amazing transition. “I’m saying God doesn’t work at all. Everything that happens to you, me, Shane, my Sharon, everyone everywhere, is nothing more than luck. The universe is random.”

What a thought. “How can you say that and not drink?”

He let his arm slide out the window into the wind. “AA every day.”

As we passed a sign that said “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas,” Shane threw what Lydia calls a conniption.

“Turn right at the next highway.”

“That’s no highway, Shane, you could barely call it a road.”

“I don’t give a flyer what you call it, turn right.”

I barreled on through, and that’s when Shane started screeching. “Stop her, Lloyd. Turn around. Are you going to stop?
Stop this fucking car
.”

I stopped. It was either that or risk giving the guy a heart attack. I didn’t like the slob, but I didn’t want to kill him. My life had enough guilt.

“Turn off the ignition,” Lloyd said. There wasn’t an ignition, so I popped the clutch and we lurched and died. Lloyd turned around to face the back. “Now, what’s the problem?”

Shane’s face had gone from radish to beet. He looked like he might blow up. “The problem is I told her to turn and she didn’t turn. I said all along we shouldn’t bring a women’s libber. I hate libbers, they never do what they’re told.”

“What makes you think I’m a women’s libber?” I asked.

“You don’t wear a bra. Probably burned it in a protest march.”

“Hippy girls don’t wear bras,” Lloyd said. “Maybe she’s a hippy girl.”

“A hippy girl would have helped with my catheter. She’s a libber with no respect for the crippled.”

Lloyd looked at me. “Why don’t you respect crippled people?”

“It’s him I don’t respect, he’s a warthog.”

We all stopped talking for a moment. Outside the ambulance, locusts or cicadas or something Texan made an insect buzz-saw noise. Inside, the only sound was a tiny, irritating whistle whenever Shane exhaled.

“Turn Moby Dick around and go back to that road,” he said.

Lloyd was patient. “We’ll be happy to if you give us a reason, Shane, but this is a long trip. We can’t make detours based on whims.”

They stared at each other. I said, “I’m not a hippy or a libber. I just don’t like bras.”

Shane’s head bobbed and jerked. “I came on this drive for you two. You’re searching for your precious wife, and she has to see the other baby she threw away. There’s nothing in it for me; you should honor my sacrifice by turning right when I say turn right.”

I pointed at Shane. “He has bigger breasts than mine, make him wear a bra.”

Lloyd ignored me. He was always ignoring me. “What about rebuilding Granma’s barn that was burned by the cur Ashley Montagu?”

“
Ah-ha
. That’s what I mean. We can’t save Granma unless you make her turn down that road.”

“Who is Ashley Montagu?” I asked.

“The cur who stole his granma’s photo albums and set fire to her barn,” Lloyd said.

Shane had almost no control over his head. I didn’t know if that was a neurological deal connected to his lack of legs or over-excitement. He spit when he talked. “I hate it when people jabber when they should be taking action. Do you have any notion the frustration a cripple suffers in a world of fools?”

He was trying to hack me off. “Who are you calling fools?”

“Do you know what time it is?”

Lloyd and I glanced at each other and did a mutual shrug. Time was meaningless in the belly of Moby Dick. May as well go down one road as another.

“Can you back a trailer?” Lloyd asked.

“Can I back a trailer? I’ve been backing this very trailer since I was twelve.” Which was true, only I was a rotten backer at twelve and I hadn’t improved with age. Hadn’t even tried the maneuver since Dad died. I got her bent across the yellow line, and a semi just about splattered Coors and us all over U.S. 287. Finally, I pulled forward into Dumas, where I did a U-turn through the A&W and drove back to Shane’s road.

“This better be good,” I said.

“I hope it’s not the hideout of Ashley Montagu,” Lloyd said.

Shane pulled himself up high enough to peer across us and out the front window. He said, “My breasts are perfectly normal for a stout man.”

***

Shane’s road was made of black tar and had all these craters that back home we call frost heaves, though they must have been something else because I don’t think Texas gets cold enough for frost heaves. It was one of those roads that ten years ago was in the country and ten years from now will be in town, but at the present nobody knows where it is.

We passed a muffler shop, an irrigation systems warehouse, a mini-garage rental building, and a salvage yard that seemed to deal exclusively in pickup trucks. I slowed down at the junkyard so Lloyd could do a head swivel. He grunted like an expert inspecting inferior goods, but he didn’t say anything.

Shane had opened his chair facing forward and humped into it. Every street sign he would demand I slow down, but I wouldn’t and he’d hit the back of my seat with his open hand.

After a couple miles of this his arm shot into a point. “There, make a left there at those mailboxes.”

I glanced at Lloyd, who nodded. The new road led into a semi-rural neighborhood of old houses in red brick and new houses in blond brick. Most of the new houses didn’t even have yards, just dirt so black it looked fake.

“This is a suburb,” I said. “We don’t have any suburbs in Wyoming, except maybe over by Casper. The boom towns have trailer parks, but those people never plan on staying longer than it takes to buy an in-state hunting license.”

“Must you chatter incessantly?” Shane said. “This entire journey you’ve done nothing but talk, talk, talk.”

“That might be an exaggeration,” Lloyd said.

Shane’s arm came by my ear, on point again.
“Banzai, motherfucker!”

Up ahead, a woman holding a baby sat on an upright suitcase. Next to her a redheaded kid in paisley shorts and a Baylor sweatshirt threw rocks at a German shepherd chained in the next yard. The kid held a leash that wound around another suitcase and a bowling bag and ended at what appeared to be a wet rat.

Shane’s voice was a bark. “Pull over.”

I rolled Moby Dick to a halt like this was a bus stop and they’d been expecting us. Which, evidently, they had been. When Shane popped open the side doors the woman started handing in suitcases.

She said, “You’re late. He’ll be home soon.”

Shane blamed me. “It’s that woman up there, she can’t drive. Maurey, Lloyd, this is Marcella.”

Marcella put out a weak smile. “And this here is Hugo Jr., that one over there is Andrew. We think Andrew has emotional obstacles to overcome. Hugo says it’s because I ate tainted shellfish when I was pregnant, but I think it’s caused by fumes from the refinery. A number of children in this area have emotional obstacles to overcome.”

Andrew ran up and leaped into Moby Dick, dragging what turned out to be the ugliest cat in America. The kid shouted, “I’m hungry. You’re so greedy you never let us eat.
Pee-U
, it stinks in here.” He looked suspiciously at Shane. “Somebody cut cheese.”

“I gave you tacos, but you were too good for them,” Marcella said. She wore a Dacron print dress with white pumps, and the hair in her bun was the same color as the dirt in her yard.

“Tacos make me puke. People who eat tacos turn into Mex’cans.”

“You said you didn’t want a cucumber sandwich.”

“Cucumber sandwiches are shit.”

At the word
shit
, Shane faked like he might backhand Andrew upside the head. Shane didn’t touch the kid, but Andrew collapsed on two spare tires and some loose crescent wrenches and proceeded to burst into tears. This scared the baby, who started howling on its own.

Marcella raised her voice over the chaos. “I’m not coming to North Carolina if you’re going to abuse Andrew.”

Shane looked down at the writhing boy. “The little lad used the B.M. word. I really will whomp him if he uses the B.M. word again.”

Andrew screamed, “
Shit.
”

I looked over at Lloyd. “Coming to North Carolina?”

His eyes had gone glass. “Interesting experiences happen when you’re on the road.”

I really don’t like loud noise or family violence. They make me nervous, and the general melee in the back end was making me way nervous. My first thoughts ran to the escape of Yukon Jack. I could handle colorful crud like this with a bit of whiskey.

Marcella piled the suitcases into a kind of chair and sat down. She dug into the bowling bag to pull out a baby bottle, which the baby rejected with authority. “Hugo will be along soon,” Marcella said. “He might shoot us all.”

Shane turned on me with some fierceness.
“Drive.”

***

Dumas to Amarillo was forty miles of flat during which the rock in my belly went from warm to hot and the nail in my lower spine dug in another inch. The process was awful—one minute I’m fairly fine, a little uncomfortable and nervous. I’m thinking, I don’t need the stuff, who’s boss here, anyway? Then the next instant God calls my bluff and nothing matters, not love, not my children, not my own health or death, nothing matters but drinking whiskey. Now. Lots of whiskey. Life is disappointing when your mind hates your body.

And added to a high-intensity case of Jack withdrawal, the moment I saw him I wanted to strangle that kid. He cried, he demanded, he browbeat his mother. He called everyone in the ambulance “stupid.” We’d gone two blocks when Marcella yelled, “
Duck
,” and tackled Andrew. She stayed on the floor until an oncoming Oldsmobile passed and moved out of sight.

“You think he saw us?” Marcella asked.

Imagine Jesus stepping serenely through a race riot. That was Lloyd. “Who saw us?” he asked.

“Hugo. He’ll get home and we’ll be gone. As soon as he gets hungry he’ll come after us. Hugo has a double standard.”

Meanwhile, Andrew is howling from being knocked onto crescent wrenches for the second time in five minutes, the baby is howling, the cat is
mew
ing like it’s lost its mother, and Shane decides the excitement is over, time for a tune on the harmonica. If I don’t get whiskey in the next three minutes I’m going to yank Moby Dick across the center line and shut them all up by plowing head-on into a cattle truck.

Lloyd must have sensed a problem. “You want me to drive?”

“I can drive, goddammit. Just keep your mouth closed and leave me alone.”

Longest damn forty miles of my life. A lot of information flew around the Dick in that forty miles, practically all of which I missed. What I did catch was Hugo Somebody took mug shots of grade school kids for a living and he’d nailed Annette Gilliam, who may or may not have traveled with him to all these Texas schools taking orders for two portrait, four large-, eight mid-,and sixteen billfold-size picture packets. I got the idea Marcella’s main complaint wasn’t so much that Hugo nailed another woman as he nailed a woman who wore cotton flowers in her hair.

Marcella’s voice reeked of defeat. “She gets the flowers from her sister, who works in the Odessa Woolworth’s.”

“You don’t have any alcohol, do you?” I asked her.

She stared like I was talking French and Shane said, “Drive,” again. Lloyd asked me if I was okay.

“No, I’m not okay. Who are these people? Am I expected to feed the brat from hell back there? Why is that woman dressed like my grandmother? I suppose she’s one of Shane’s floozies he butt-fucks with a pistol while she knits baby booties and begs for more of the barrel.”

“
Butt-fuck, butt-fuck,
” Andrew shouted. “
Floozie, woozie, Mama wants a butt-fuck
.” He ducked out of Shane’s reach. The kid was a fast learner.

Shane sounded like he was gargling. “I’ll thank you to watch your filthy mouth in front of my sister and her brood. Simply because you live in the gutter is no reason to oink like a pig.”

“Sister?”

“You sure you’re okay?” Lloyd asked.

“I have to potty,” Andrew yelled.

An armadillo appeared on the road ahead. I slammed brakes and everybody and everything in the rear end slid forward until they piled into something. The trailer full of Coors kind of buckled into a jackknife, although it didn’t roll. Thank God it didn’t roll.

I killed that armadillo dead. My lower lip was bleeding on the steering wheel. Andrew and Hugo Jr. were howling yet a third time, and the whimper sound turned out to be coming from me.

I twisted in my seat to check the mess in the back. “Is the baby all right?”

Marcella was on the floor on her back, holding Hugo Jr. to her chest. “He’s better off than me. What’d I do to make you stop so fast?”

“Where’d you get your license?” Andrew yelled. “From a Cracker Jacks box!”

Lloyd touched my arm and said, “I better drive from here.”