Sorrow Floats (17 page)

Comanches are one of the tribes Hank Elkrunner approves of. He has strict standards when it comes to authentic Native Americans. The best are the mountain tribes with four-pole foundation tipis—Blackfoot, Flathead, Nez Percé—although he looks at Crow as a short step from Communists. He says the Plains tribes—Sioux and Cheyenne—are overrated because of the Custer thing, and Apaches are the only southwest Indians worth dealing with.

“I dated a Hopi once,” he said. “All she talked about was TV. She watched
Truth or Consequences
while I humped her.”

Bottom of Hank’s list of real Indians are the Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma, especially the Cherokee. “No better than white farmers,” he said, which meant no better than anyone.

Comanche, Oklahoma, was a three-gas-station town with a Korean War air force fighter plane mounted on concrete in the city park. Critter had me turn right at this Humble station with old-fashioned pumps where you actually see the gasoline in a glass bubble on top. It was neat. Lloyd wanted me to stop so he could make the owner an offer.

A mile or so west of town we came to a peeling white-frame farmhouse with a full-length porch, two huge pecan trees in the yard, and a half dozen Volkswagen buses and bugs parked at random, like they’d been tossed by a tornado. Every one of the Volks was painted with garish designs and hippy code words—
LSD, Peace, Speed Kills, Wow, Love, 13, Gatorade.

I’d seen hippy houses before. In Laramie we called them train stations—one bunch of people constantly coming and going, another bunch sitting there with nothing to do, and nobody cleans the bathroom.

It was late afternoon and hotter than a popcorn popper when Critter’s arm came by my ear and she yelled, “There’s Freedom.”

I spotted right off which one of the seven or eight vagrant types was Freedom. He stood dead center on the porch, hands on his hips and what you would have to call a sneer on his face. “Why isn’t Freedom’s hair long like the others?” I asked.

“He hasn’t been out of jail long enough to grow it out.” Critter stuck her face out my window—which put her mouth at ear level—and shouted, “Freedom!”

A couple of longhairs stood up to watch me park next to one of the pecan trees. A tanned woman with no shirt on came out the door and sat on the steps, nursing a baby. A dog rolled onto his back with all four legs sticking straight up.

I said, “It’s Tobacco Road.”

“No, that’s Zig Zag. He wants his belly rubbed, but don’t touch him unless you don’t mind fleas.”

The dog looked the least flea-ridden of anyone in the yard. I’m not normally prejudiced against the counterculture, but there’s freaks who have long hair and get high but otherwise think roughly along the same lines as the rest of us, then there’s the other kind. These freaks were the other kind.

Before Moby Dick came to a complete stop the side door popped open, and with a squeal, Critter streaked across the dirt yard and up the steps where she latched on. Freedom draped his right arm over her shoulders. He didn’t seem as happy to see Critter as she was to see him, because the expression on his face stayed the same. He didn’t even look down at her, just stared over her shoulder in our direction.

“Maybe Sharon came through here,” Lloyd said.

“Let’s go see what a guy who travels freely on the sixth level is like,” I said.

Shane was strangely quiet. When I looked in back he was shoving his chair through the door with a bad-taste pucker on his mouth. Marcella was bent over, changing the baby’s diaper. She’d tightened her bun, as if we were making a social call. Andrew, amazingly enough, was asleep.

All the way from Anadarko through Fort Sill, forty miles, he beat two rocks on an upturned plastic bucket and sang, “
Here comes the bride, big, fat, and wide. Where is the groom, he’s in the dressing room. Why is he there, he forgot his underwear
,” over and over and over until I was about ready to stop Moby Dick and strangle the kid dead in front of his mother.

On the thirtieth
big, fat, and wide
I heard a clump. By the time I looked back he was asleep on a ratty army blanket, using the bowling bag as a pillow. I’d have given all the money I would ever own to be able to fall asleep like that.

I climbed out my side and walked around to join Lloyd where he stood rubbing his leg and inspecting a charred Volkswagen bug.

He touched the door handle and peered in the broken window. “It was the battery under the backseat. Sparked into the stuffing. I’ve seen a dozen burned like this.”

Critter was on a rave. “Beefheart was totally cool, you wouldn’t believe the energy. I mean, when he sang ‘Dachau Blues’ waves of love washed from the crowd onto the stage. He picked up on it, too, I could tell by his aura lines.”

Freedom kept his eyes on Shane’s wheelchair. “Where’s the stuff?”

“Glenda split for Canada and I got a ride to Amarillo, where these straight people picked me up. I told them they could crash here tonight. Meet the straight people, Freedom. That’s Lloyd and Maurey. She’s an alcoholic, Shane’s the dude getting in the chair. There’s a whole family inside, but I forget their names.”

Something about the way Critter said
straight people
made me think she was making a point in code. Freedom didn’t care. He said, “Where’s the goddamn stuff?”

“Can’t we talk about that later?”

“We’ll talk about it now.” He came down the steps and moved toward Moby Dick in these long strides—real purposeful, manly.

Critter followed, childlike. “I got your stuff, Freedom. It’s okay. Now’s just not the time.”

Shane threw his hands up in self-defense, but Freedom marched past the chair, reached into Moby Dick, and pulled out Critter’s duffel bag. She didn’t say anything, just stood there looking underage.

Freedom had on a sleeveless undershirt, the kind Grandpa Pierce used to wear. He wore sandals, which matched him up with Lloyd. When Freedom’s hands yanked things out of Critter’s bag, you could see the brown stains on his fingertips. The knuckles of his left hand had
Love
tattooed in blue ink, one letter to a finger, and the knuckles on his right hand had
Hate
.

Another tapestry skirt came out, and a pair of thongs. He pulled out a glass bulb thing with rubber tubes off the sides, which I took as a high-tech water pipe. Then Freedom started pulling out brown paper packages, each one shaped like a brick.

I was pissed. Critter stared at the ground, where she could avoid eye contact. Lloyd’s eyes were on the wrapped bricks, and so were Marcella’s from the door of the ambulance. Shane looked at the ground, too, about the same spot as Critter.

“You knew she had dope,” I said to Shane.

Marcella squawked,
“Dope.”
She turned quickly and held her hand over Andrew’s eyes. He was asleep, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

“Is that true?” Lloyd asked Shane.

Shane looked at Lloyd—he still couldn’t face me. “We couldn’t leave her there. You would have left her if I told you.”

I was way pissed. “We could have gone to jail, you fat jackass. Even your own sister. You risked all your friends just to impress a hippy dopehead you wanted to nail.”

Freedom’s voice was harsh. “There’s only eight here, where’s the other four?”

I knew right then he was a jerk because Critter was more afraid of him than she was of me, and I was ready to kill her. “I told you, Glenda split for Canada. She went for the free land.”

“The cunt.”

“It was her money, Freedom.”

Can you believe a guy with the name Freedom using the cunt word? Here’s a truth: There’s not a man alive, no matter how liberated or advanced, who, when the conditions are right, won’t call a woman a cunt.

***

“Owsley, go get me my pipe,” Freedom ordered.

A boy I hadn’t noticed before said, “Get it yourself, I’m doing something.” The boy sat against a pecan tree trunk with a drawing notebook in his lap. Thirteen, maybe fourteen, he was the Hollywood version of an angel. Pure skin, soft cheekbones, eyes a light blue sliding into silver—but the beautiful element that jumped out and touched your heart was his hair. His hair was sunshine blond and thick and fell like a Yosemite waterfall over his shoulders to his waist. How this angel ended up in a yard full of scuzballs was the great mystery of Oklahoma.

Freedom’s fingers tore into one of the packages. He didn’t raise his voice, but I got the idea he didn’t have to. A truly chilling threat works better as a whisper than a scream. “Owsley, bring me my pipe. Now.”

“Why can’t somebody else fetch your stuff? I’m the only one out here doing anything.”

“Owsley.”

The boy pouted, but he moved. When he stood, he had the body of a football halfback. Good shoulders, no hips, just a trace of ass. He was about the same age as Sam Callahan when he and I de-virginated each other, but they were as different, visually, as a Kentucky Thoroughbred from a llama. Emotionally, they both tended to sulkiness.

After Owsley went in the house, I drifted over to check out the drawing pad. It was a charcoal picture of a hawk with its wings spread and a snake in its claws. Came from one of those
Don’t Tread on Me
flags, I think. The drawing was really good for a kid. Really good for anyone. He knew how to fine shade with charcoal, which is something I never pulled off back at GroVont High art class.

“Is that a narc?” Freedom pointed down the road at Hugo Sr. sitting in his Oldsmobile.

I was flipping through Owsley’s art pad and took a moment to frame an answer that wouldn’t get Hugo Sr. shot at, but before I came up with anything Shane jumped in. He’d been quiet too long—extended contriteness was not his deal. “That’s my sister’s husband. She left him in Amarillo and he’s been following ever since. He’s harmless, unless you are married to him.”

Freedom’s eyes went squinty. “Looks like a narc to me.”

Marcella’s head came out of Moby Dick. “Hugo Sr. is a children’s portraitist, a very good one. Whatever a narc is, he isn’t that.”

“He makes me nervous out there. DeGarmo, take care of it.”

One of the anonymous scuz-types went into a whine. “You’ll smoke while I’m gone.”

Freedom’s eyes snapped at the chosen scuz. “Jesus Christ, what is with you people today?”

DeGarmo trotted off down the road toward Hugo Sr. His jeans had leather patches all over the butt, and some were peeling away so you could see the top half of his crack.

“What’s he gonna do to Hugo?” Marcella asked.

Freedom wasn’t even watching to see what DeGarmo did to Hugo. He was more interested in the pot sifting between his fingers. He said, “I better not have to send someone after Owsley.”

The scuz lieutenant was still fifty feet away when Hugo Sr. started the Oldsmobile, did a three-step U-turn, and drove off toward Comanche. Guess he wasn’t as stupid as I’d assumed. Hardly anyone ever is.

Cocktail hour. The day was one to be proud of, so far; I’d driven all the way from Amarillo, Texas, with scarcely a tremor. My neck muscles hurt, and I had that fluttery stomach only alcohol can un-flutter, but I’d said, “No whiskey till Comanche,” and here I was. An alcoholic could never have shown my level of self-control.

You want to talk addicts, you should have seen that pack of lost dogs that circled Freedom as he finger-sifted marijuana. Not a functioning frontal lobe in the bunch. I’d have been shocked to hear a two-clause sentence escape from any of those chapped lips. Their eye pupils were huge black holes—as compared to Freedom’s pupils, which were pinpricks. Most of their mouths weren’t quite closed. The
Duh
look.

Winston, the married English professor, had pinprick pupils like Freedom’s. I think he was self-medicating or something because he couldn’t get a stiffie unless the girl was on top and he took frigging forever in coming. Or maybe that was an age thing. Winston would lie there, his arms thrown over his head, and babble something from Camus like “Mother died today. Or, maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the home says: ‘Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy.’”

I’d look down at his curly armpits and think, What’ve I got to do to make the intellectual dildo come? Christ, no grade is worth this.

When Winston gave me a C, I put a full rubber in his car ashtray where I knew his wife would find it. Us self-proclaimed victim types can be nasty.

Years ago there was a fried-food drive-in in Jackson named the Purple Cow. The carhops wore uniforms like Swiss milkmaids yodeling over burgers named after strains of cattle—Angus, Holstein. The Charolais Burger came with bacon and Velveeta cheese. Whenever our family drove by the Purple Cow on our way to church or someplace, Dad would recite: “‘To each his own,’ said the old lady as she kissed the purple cow.”

At the time I thought the saying was meaningless silliness meant to amuse us kids, like Mom’s “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,” but now I see the old lady in a deeper vein. Dad was never meaningless like Mom. I think what he meant was weird people are okay. Just because your brother is gay, or worse, or the only nice boy you’ve run into in months has a reputation for jack-jobbing animals, that’s no reason to condemn them. Some people live in Wyoming, some in New York City. Some people eat TV dinners off aluminum foil trays, and some people kiss cows. There is no better or worse, only to each his own.

I considered the different-strokes-for-different-folks stance as I put Dustin in my mouth and Freedom put his pipe in his. Dustin was the name I’d chosen for Lloyd’s half-pint because Dustin Hoffman played a half-pint in
Midnight Cowboy
.

Freedom’s pipe was a real pipe, the U-joint kind plumbers find things in under the sink. It was two feet long with the hole out on the end covered by a scooped piece of screen from a screen door. It held a fistful of pot at once, and when Freedom exhaled his nostrils blew like Frostbite on a twenty-below day.

Dustin was ice cream, fresh air, pretty dresses on little girls, and riding Frostbite over a fence, all rolled into one fine swallow. I took delight in whiskey.

When Shannon was eight months old she would shake her head side to side and laugh the cutest laugh you could imagine. Sam Callahan said she was making herself dizzy on purpose for fun, which proved the need to get high was innate in the human species, as inbred as the sucking reflex and crying when you stub your toe.

Lydia said Sam’s nature-wants-us-stoned theory was nothing but an excuse for stealing her Valiums.

Park told me anthropologists have studied hundreds of cultures around the globe and there are only two universal characteristics: every culture has a way to get fucked up, and they all have a rule against nailing your mother.

So—I wasn’t to blame. Freedom’s method was illegal, mine was addictive, Indians used peyote, and scaredy cats used Jesus. It all came down to reality avoidance.

“Really prime stuff, huh?” Critter said to Freedom, who didn’t appear ready to share with the milling pack. “I handled it just the way you said, tested from two kilos, weighed them all, pretended it was commercial crap, which was pretty hard, believe you me. That stuff had me seeing tracers.”

Freedom hit deep twice more. “Clean up the kitchen. Dog Whiffer made chili and left a mess.”

“Did I do good, Freedom?”

He squinted his eyes at her through the blue smoke. “You’re four pounds short.”

“I need to pee.” I said. “You got a bathroom in the house?”

Critter’s eyes weren’t the same flashy, pert sparkles they’d been in Amarillo. It’s like we’d entered a zone of stagnation. “Sure,” she said. “All houses have bathrooms.”

“Toilet’s plugged,” Owsley said from under the tree.

“I just fixed the toilet last week,” Critter said.

Owsley didn’t look up from his drawing pad. The angel face showed remarkable concentration. “Dolf got paranoid and flushed the plants.”

Freedom said, “Dumb shit.”

Lloyd already had Moby Dick’s hood up, and Shane was zeroing his chair in on the topless nurser. Looked as if they planned to stay awhile. As I walked toward the house with Critter, she touched my arm. Touching seemed to be something she was used to and I wasn’t.

With her other hand she tugged the red bikini top up on her mound breasts. “I feel real yangy about lying about the pot. The karma adjustment will have me lotused all afternoon tomorrow.”

“I’m not mad at you, you needed a ride and did what had to be done to get it. Shane’s the one I’m pissed at. We’ve entered this business partnership and he can’t be trusted. The jerk.”

“You should be kinder to Shane. He says you are racked with guilt because he quit drinking and you can’t even though you are young and healthy.”

Shane was leaning forward in his chair, pretending to admire the baby while he poked his nose into tanned cleavage. His body kind of spazzed and he went into a coughing fit that left drool off his chin.

I said, “There’s enough guilt in my life. Shane isn’t on the list.”

***

Inside, the house was typical of what I’d seen of train stations—four thousand dollars sunk into the stereo system and maybe fifty cents on the rest of the furnishings. Everything was close to the floor. The two couches and a chair seemed to have their legs cut off. Some corn-on-the-cob crates were covered with pop cans and paper plates on which ashes and dried chili made a holocaust-colored mess. The rug had multiple burn holes, especially in front of the couches and stereo, and the only decoration higher than my waist was a hand-painted sign over the kitchen door:
Getting a job means admitting that you can’t take care of yourself.

Five or six versions of the people outside sprawled around the room in big-pupiled stupor. One guy was frozen in an uncomfortable kneeling position in front of the record stack. He’d gone catatonic with two fingers stuck in a Doobie Brothers album cover. Another guy lying on his back on the floor suddenly hurled his hand at the ceiling, then drew it slowly back in until it touched the tip of his nose, then hurled it up again. A girl with
Eat Me
written in red fingernail polish on her forehead danced to no music in the corner.

One December back in Laramie, Joe Bob’s fraternity elected him Finals Week Procurement Officer. That meant Joe Bob had to find and buy diet pills so the frat boys could wire themselves into all-night study sessions where they talked nonstop, chewed gum like cows, and sweat the stinkingest sweat that ever came off a man.

Joe Bob took me to a train station out by the Medicine Bow Mountains where some needle people had a speed factory set up in what used to be a tack room. The needle people had a black Lab with about thirteen two-month-old puppies that wandered the house eating anything that hit the floor and crapping.

That much shit was way beyond hippy handling capacities, so they’d bought a hundred-pound drum of lime, and whenever someone vaguely coherent spotted puppy poop they’d dump a McDonald’s medium soft drink cup of lime on the pile and forget about it. The system worked pretty well so long as you looked where you stepped, but personally I was disgusted. Hundreds of white, dusty piles gave the house a surrealistic, moonscape appearance.

Disgusting as the needles-and-dogshit people were, this bunch in Oklahoma had them beat.

“Don’t sit on that couch,” Critter said, indicating a Forest Service-green divan being slept on by a person of unknown sexual persuasion. “That’s Arlo’s couch, and anyone else who uses it is in big trouble.”

“Is Arlo dangerous?”

“This science professor at OU is studying body lice, and on Wednesday afternoons he pays a dollar apiece for every live one Arlo brings in.”

“The couch is a crab farm?”

“Arlo is a crab farm. He made seventy-five bucks off his pubes last week but spent it all on drugs to numb the itch. I wish Freedom would make him split. I hate little spiders. I better not find any on me.”

“Fuck you, Critter,” Arlo said. He wasn’t asleep after all. “Give me any more grief and I’ll sit on your pillow.”

***

Let’s skip a detailed description of the bathroom. Some things are better left unexamined.

***

Back in the kitchen, the
Eat Me
girl danced and ate ice cream out of the carton with a fork. You can always tell a train station where the people are into narcotics by the shortage of spoons. Her dance was a kind of Tibetan hula thing with lots of flow and no rhythm.

Critter stood in front of the electric stove holding a steel wool pad that looked remarkably like my mother’s hairdo.

“Maurey, this is Dog Whiffer.”

The notorious Dog Whiffer who made chili and didn’t clean up after herself. “Freedom’s in the crappiest mood. He got ripped off or something in Dallas. Went down for five thousand Seconals and came back with twenty-five hits of mescaline.”

Critter stared at the brown crust on the burners, apparently stymied by where-to-begin. She asked, “Save any for me?”

“Freedom said not to. He says you get funny on mescaline.”

“I like that.”

“Last time you went deep on us.”

Critter gave up on the steel pad and dipped herself a bowl of chili. “Want some? It’s not vegetarian or anything. We transcended the petty divisiveness of moral judgments based on food.”

I went into what-the-hell, you-only-live-once, and accepted a wooden bowl and a fork. To be safe, I sloshed in some Dustin before I ate.

Dog Whiffer did a counterclockwise twirl on her toes. “Freedom was ungodly till he copped some Dilaudid. You should have heard the fight with Owsley. The kid hasn’t been going to school and a truant officer showed up at the door.”

“Kids today don’t know how easy they got it,” Critter said, as if her generation walked barefoot through the snow to a one-room schoolhouse.

“What’s the age difference between you and Owsley?” I asked.

“Three years. But they’re vital years.”

The chili was tasty stuff. Dog Whiffer had put in more beans than most cooks in Wyoming. Wyomingites eat lots of cow, especially the men. Usually men consider other men who cook as effeminate, only the stigma doesn’t count with straight cow things—chili, rare steaks barbecued outside, whole calves reamed lengthwise and turned slowly over hot coals.

Shane’s voice boomed from the living room. “South America, the southern tip of Paraguay, I contracted terminal malaria. A native shaman mixed up a cocktail our Negro guide said was used to kill zombies. With some uncertainty, I quaffed the brew. In less than an hour, I was free of malaria, but I’ve had no feeling in my legs ever since. I’ll give you twenty dollars if you let me tweak those exquisite breasts.”

Critter’s fork stopped in midair as we listened for an outcome. A moment later, Shane went into W. C. Fields. “I’m a little short today, but I will gladly pay you next Tuesday.” He got a laugh instead of a slap. Rankled me no end.

“You think the others might do food?” Critter asked.

“I’ll take a couple bowls to Marcella and Lloyd. You can ask Shane yourself.”

Critter dipped a tin cup into the pot. “You better work out this envy thing with Shane. If he dies before you’ve reconciled the friction, the burden may slop as far as your next three lifetimes.”

“That blob’s not going to die.”

Shane’s stupid, lying story must have unstuck the catatonic because the walls suddenly vibrated with Doobie Brothers. I slid Dustin into my back pocket and took the two bowls from Critter. That’s the up side of half-pints—they fit in the back pocket of a pair of Wrangler’s.

As I left the kitchen, Dog Whiffer shouted over the music, “I hope you don’t mind, but I balled Freedom while you were gone. He said it was okay.”