Sorrow Floats (9 page)

Lloyd drove, I drank, Shane talked. While all three musketeers were practiced professionals at our chosen tasks, Shane was beyond practiced. Shane was a Renaissance talker. An eighth-degree black belt of the mouth.

In the Wind River Canyon he lectured on Manuel Lisa and early explorations of Yellowstone, including the Hayden Expedition of 1872, then he went on to reasons why the South could have won the Civil War and proper procedures for cooking a peacock—boil it forty minutes, then hang it by the neck outside for three days. Otherwise treat it like a turkey.

Between pronouncements he blew six or seven notes of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” on the harmonica, sometimes eight notes. Lloyd’s face never changed, and he never gave comment. I think he was listening to the engine, which he found more interesting.

Shane gave a blow-by-blow account of flax farming in Nicaragua—figures he was part farmer—and why women went nuts over Steve McQueen. He proved the first five lines of the Lord’s Prayer is actually a limerick by reciting them in singsong:

Our Father who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

On Earth as it is in Heaven

“Second line doesn’t rhyme right,” I said.

“Does in Hebrew.”

I turned to Lloyd. “Does he always talk this much?”

“Only when he likes someone.”

“But I don’t like him.”

“Shane doesn’t take that into account when he decides who to like.”

Shane spoke in essay form as he compared the Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, and Willie Nelson. “The most influential bands of the last five years, and each has two lead guitars, a keyboard player, and double drums. Can you name another band with that configuration?” He convinced me Lou Gehrig was better than Babe Ruth, male birds are more beautiful than female, and the space program failed to ignite the public’s imagination because none of the astronauts was named Buck.

“Buzz wasn’t close enough?” I asked.

“Do not insult my intelligence, lassie.”

Shane said Ringo Starr was the greatest Beatle, then named the mothers of Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe on the
Bonanza
TV show—Elizabeth, Ingrid, and Maria—and the last picture show to play in
The Last Picture Show
—
The Kid from Texas
, starring Audie Murphy and Gale Storm.

“Have you ever noticed Australian women are made particularly ardent by anal entry?” Shane said. He blew the second phrase of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” “The French have seven words for a man going down on a woman. We have
blow job
for a woman on a man or, God forbid, a man on a man, and
sixty-nine
for everybody on everybody, but the English language does not recognize the male giving pleasure to the female.”

The radio was broken, of course. I should have known. I tried drinking faster, but Shane’s voice was a fog cutter. Lloyd tuned him out to the point where he might as well have been driving alone. Lloyd had practice, I think. The familiarity level was hard to pin down. They might have formed the team two days before I met them, or twenty years.

If Shane ever came up for air, I meant to ask him why he thought Ringo Starr was the greatest Beatle. I thought so, too, and I’d never met anyone who agreed with me. The idea that Shane and I might have something in common was fairly disturbing. Sam Callahan said George Harrison was greatest for spiritual reasons, and Park wanted to be John Lennon because he aspired to darkness. Dothan hated them all.

The spring of our freshman year, John Lennon went on the radio in England and said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Sugar’s sister, Charlotte, organized a record-burning party on the basketball court behind the Foursquare Gospel Church in Jackson. Dothan and I had our first major fight over the Beatles and religion. I owned all the Beatles albums and most of their forty-fives, and he didn’t own any, and he wanted to burn mine.

“People will think we’re Catholics if we don’t,” he said.

“I’m fifteen and have a daughter nearly two years old, what do I care what people think?”

Sam and I steamed the labels off my Beatle albums and glued them on Sonny and Cher albums, then we slipped Sonny and Cher into the Beatle covers. On the forty-fives we switched Beatles for Sopwith Camel, the Detergents, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

While I was at cheerleading practice my mother let Dothan steal everything I owned by the Beatles. That night Sam and I stood back from the glowing crowd and cheered as “I Got You, Babe” went up in smelly, melted plastic. I kept those Beatle records right up to the day Dothan moved me and all my stuff he didn’t covet out of the house.

“Have you seen her?” Without looking at me, Lloyd handed over a three-by-five color photo, the kind with the ragged border developers were into back in the sixties. “Sharon might be going by Carbonneau, or Gunderson. That’s her maiden name. Gunderson.”

A girl, maybe eighteen, stood next to a sign that read
Casino Salvage
in front of a brightly lit stucco building. She had straight chestnut hair with these thick bangs that hid her eyebrows. Her face was happy as she vamped the camera by pulling her brown skirt up over one knee, revealing a bony leg and a tooled cowboy boot. She was thin, but not anorexic, only her shoulders slumped. Could have been somewhat pretty if she concentrated on posture.

“Is this your wife?”

He nodded. “Someone in Salt Lake saw a girl like her in a Teton campground last summer.”

There were hundreds of girls like her in Teton campgrounds last summer—size sevens with brown hair aren’t exactly unique—but I didn’t want to tell Lloyd that. He obviously took the deal seriously. His eyes were probing the darkness beyond our headlights, but I could tell he was watching me.

Behind us, Shane finally broke through the second phrase of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and into the meat of the song. I had a terrible intuition he was one of those harmonica players who learns one song and goes no further.

I sipped Scout. “She’s pretty.”

Lloyd glanced at the picture, then back ahead. “She was FBLA Sweetheart in high school. That’s Future Business Leaders of America. Sharon can type ninety-two words a minute with only two mistakes.”

She had that secretarial look around the temples. “Was the picture taken a long time ago?”

“June 7, 1966—the day we opened our salvage yard. Las Vegas is paradise if your interests run to redemption of abandoned automobiles.” Lloyd stepped on the floor dimmer switch as two semis came at us, then past. He glanced at their rear ends in the mirror and said, “Sharon sure was proud of our junkyard.”

“Everybody’s proud of something.”

Behind us, Shane went quiet, for him, anyway. He muttered under his breath and made a thump sound as he slid to the floor. When I checked it out he was sitting on the pile of unrolled sleeping bags, digging furiously through a blue backpack. Probably searching for food.

“If Sharon was so proud and junk in Vegas is so lucrative, why did she leave?”

Lloyd turned and looked full at me. Without the Jesus eyes, he came off as any other farmer beaten to nonexistence by weather and banks. But the glowing eyes made him appear to know things the people he looked at didn’t know. Imagine you go to tip the pizza delivery boy and you suddenly realize the kid is Nostradamus. That’s the feeling Lloyd causes.

“You know darn well why she left me,” he said. “I’m a drunk. Only a fool stands by a drunk.” His eyes went back to the road. “Sharon took it a long time, longer than she should have.”

Scout was committing foreplay with my frontal lobe. He caused the white stripes rushing into the headlights and under Lloyd’s side of the ambulance to go hypnotic. I really liked that.

Nineteen sixty-six meant Lloyd and Sharon were your basic May-December romance. Or March-October. What would it be like to live surrounded by dead cars with a lover old as your own father? Lloyd had to be at least forty-five, probably hadn’t had a hard-on he didn’t wake up with in years. I read in
Cosmo
that girls with old lovers are actually trying to nail their dads.

Lloyd kept his voice noncommittal. “We met at a demolition derby in Prescott, Arizona. I’d been drinking beer all afternoon and got in a fight with a mechanic who said fuel injectors decrease acceleration. Sharon picked me off the arena dirt and three weeks later we were married.”

Lloyd swerved to miss a mule deer and just about sideswiped two more. Ever since Dubois, we’d been passing antelope, but these were the first deer. One thing I don’t understand about Wyoming is why, the minute the plains get dark, all the animals make straight for the nearest asphalt.

“Sharon and I had our junkyard and each other, and nothing else mattered until I betrayed her for the bottle. I blamed the pressure of running a business, or the Nevada heat, or my hangover—a scraped thumb gave me excuse to shoot the whole day. Whenever Sharon gave me her sad look I said ‘Be glad you have a husband who doesn’t gamble.’”

Lloyd’s talk had the rhythm of a rehearsed speech. I’d bet my next drink this story usually started with “My name is Lloyd and I’m an alcoholic.” You’d never catch me spilling my guts to a bunch of drunk losers turned coffee-swilling losers. “Here’s how far down I went. Ain’t I princely for not dying so I could sit through this meeting.”

I’d rather be interesting and pathetic than boring and pathetic.

“She stuck by me for fourteen months. Then one Sunday while I was breaking an automatic transmission off a brand-new Lincoln wrecked by some high-roller, she packed her overnight bag and ran away. Didn’t even leave a note.”

“At least Sharon didn’t steal your child and throw you into the street.”

Lloyd didn’t comment on my tragedy. AA people consider it bad form to one-up during the other guy’s talk. “I don’t remember hardly any of the next two years. I know I stole and ate dog food. I changed my oil without replacing the filter. Once I was hospitalized for drinking transmission fluid.

“One morning I found some whiskey in a couch at a Manpower temporary employment office in Memphis, the next thing I woke up in a hotel room in Mexico City with a broken leg. I’d lost two months.”

It’s really not so bad driving through Wyoming at night while a gentle man’s voice drones from the seat next to you. The towns are mostly eighty, ninety miles apart, so there’s no slowing down or speeding up. Cars and trucks came at us one at a time with plenty of gap between lights. Lloyd’s voice was calm, like a bubbling stream, only his was a stream with words you could listen to. His pitiful story showed me the degradation of real alcoholism. It reassured me that I wasn’t a real alcoholic.

I got intimate with Scout and waited for more been-there-and-back stuff, but none came for a mile because Lloyd seemed hypnotized himself. I guess he was dwelling on his days of glory.

“So,” I prompted, “you woke up in a hotel with a broken leg.”

His face snapped back from somewhere. “The management thought since I couldn’t walk they’d send Shane to take care of me.”

“Our Shane? He couldn’t take care of anyone.”

Lloyd gave me a some-people-are-naive shrug. “Shane stayed with me every moment for two weeks. He held me together through the shudders and stomach pain, the termite attacks, the suicide waves and night terrors. He convinced me I lost Sharon because I was a drunk and if I stopped being a drunk I could get her back. He’s stuck with me through more than three years of searching for her.”

“A regular Ralph Nader.”

Lloyd took the picture from my hand and returned it to the breast pocket of his overalls. “I chose to live. I’d never have made that choice, or even known I had the choice, without Shane Rinesfoos.”

The subject of this Drunks Aglow account had been unnaturally quiet during the testimonial. Could the same grotesque fatso who offered twenty bucks to see my tits lead a double life as a selfless savior? I turned to look back at the saint and screamed.

Shane had his penis out.
Yuck
. He was bent over like a zoo monkey playing with its wienie, only Shane was rolling on a condom.

I screamed again. “Let me out. Pull over, goddammit, let me
go
.” I clawed the door handle.
“Fucking perverts.”

At my first scream, Lloyd swerved right, but he didn’t slow Moby Dick. “What’s the problem? Are you sick?”

The handle came up, the door popped open, and pavement raced under my eyes, but when the dramatic moment said
Bail out
, I went chicken. After all, we’re talking overweight cripple here. Exposure would be in character, but rape? There was no sense in a road burn death over an exposed pecker. I refuse to be killed by a penis.

I swung my anger back on Lloyd. “You old men are sick with your games. You think because I drink and ride off in your mobile slut house that I’m like that. Well, I’m not, Bucko. Like that.”

“You lost me,” Lloyd said.

“Lloyd,” Shane said.

Lloyd glanced at Shane on the floor, then at me. He reached toward my shoulder and I flinched—almost fell out the door.

Lloyd said, “He has to change his plumbing twice a day to stop infection. He’s not a pervert.”

“I am, too,” Shane said, “only not this time.”

Bent over, his belly had all these horizontal folds with his little penis sticking out of one like a zipper on a down-filled parka. How could he hang a rubber around that worm?

This was more insult than threat. “What kind of exhibitionist uses a condom?”

He leered up at me. “This would be easier with your help.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I could hold it while you tape the root.”

“Have you ever priced nursing homes?”

Where most condoms have the ego-boosting large-tip reservoir, this one had a rubber straw. Maybe Shane was into being sucked off from three feet away.

His pink face broke sweat from the exertion. “If I were a pervert, I would certainly pick a girl younger than you.”

A plastic bag was taped to the inside of his thigh. Another hose came off the bottom of the bag and ran to a twist clamp taped to his ankle.