Western Swing (26 page)

• • •

“Give me four lines of ‘Wine Over Matter.'”

“Huh.” I glanced at Ron. He'd rolled over on his back at the first ring, but hadn't quite come conscious.

“Just the chorus, Lannie, Choosie does the verses.”

“Who is this?”

From the other end, his voice rose in a flat tenor, “
My mind's lost all feelin', the wine keeps it reelin'.
”

“Mickey, it's four o'clock in the morning.”

“Put your teeth in, I'm on the phone.”

“I'm married to an oral surgeon, remember. My teeth are in.”

The sound of a scuffle came over the line, followed by a
clonk
as if Mickey dropped the phone. “I was talking to someone here. A few people came up to the room after last call and stayed for breakfast. Pretend it's in harmony, Lana Sue.”

“I'm not singing over the phone to you, Mickey. I'm going to hang up and fall back asleep and tomorrow this'll be a bad dream.”

For a moment there was silence. Mickey was pouting. “You're so beautiful when you sing, Lana Sue. It's when you talk that you turn into a pain.”

“Mickey, don't be unreasonable. You're drunk and I'm not. On top of which, my husband is asleep right here next to me. What would he think if he woke up and I was crooning into the telephone.”

“Leave him, Lana Sue. You're worth too much to live with a dentist.” His voice rose. “Don't drink that. Felipe Bob pissed in it.” Behind Mickey I heard the sound of glass breaking. Then Mickey's voice again. “You were snorting on the can and he couldn't wait.” Then more glass broke.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“The motel room.”

“I know that. What city is the motel room in?”

“Hold on. What's the name of this place? Look in the tank on the back of the toilet, honey. I bought you a present. Spain.”

“There's a town named Spain?”

“A country. Lacy's on a world tour, opening for Charley Pride and Minnie Pearl. We learned ‘Kawliga was a wooden Indian' in Spanish. You know Spanish for Indian?”

“Indio.”

“Charley and Lacy are going over real good, but there's a language problem with some of Minnie's material. You belong to a country club yet, Lannie?”

“I resent that question.”

“Do your car windows go down when you push a button?”

“We have air conditioning. I don't do windows.”

“You get your hair done by a male fairy hairdresser?”

“I don't have to put up with this, Mickey. Just because you haven't changed in sixteen years doesn't mean I'm not allowed to grow up.” Mickey's end was silent except for someone coughing her lungs out in the background.

“What's that?” I asked.

Mickey talked like he was holding his breath. “Moroccan sticky.”

“Oh.”

“Listen, I'm sorry I gave you a hard time. Things have been tough lately and I thought hearing you sing might help me feel better.” I wondered what could possibly happen in Mickey's life to make things tough.

“Please,” he said.

Ron was asleep on his side, facing me. His mouth was open and one elbow drooped over his head, exposing a blond armpit. He looked like he would sleep through a hurricane.

I sang it as a lullaby:

“My mind's lost all feelin'

The wine keeps it reelin'

Helpin' my heart take the fall

And I'm mad as a hatter

It's wine over matter

But it's better than nothin' at all.

How's that?”

Mickey said, “We're playing the Houston rodeo next month.”

I don't know what I expected. “Sounds great,” maybe, or “You haven't lost a thing.” At least “Thanks.” No comment at all pissed me off.

“You've played Houston before.”

“You oughta come out this time. We'll be at the Bowie Knife all week.”

“My husband doesn't like country music. I doubt if he'd go.”

“Fuck the dentist and drive yourself over, Lannie.”

“Don't hold your breath.”

Mickey's voice came louder again. “You got it on backwards,” he said. “That way gets come in the guy's ear.”

The phone went dead.

• • •

Hearing Mickey always brought on a certain wistfulness. I don't really care for wistfulness. It smacks too close to regret and regret is an emotion I don't abide. After his call, I held the phone in my lap and watched Ron sleep until the off-the-hook helicopter noise sounded. Gently laying the phone in its cradle, I slid from the bed, shrugged on my blue robe, and wandered downstairs to the family room.

Security lights from the street filtered through the humidity and windows to cast an unreal orangish glow on Ron's tuner. I sat on the carpet cross-legged, moving the dial until Suzie Burkburnett and “Mama” came through the speakers, filling me with that old warm feeling. God, I love country music.

Expecting and alone—again

Mama, please let me come home
—
again.

My wistfulness wasn't so much for Mickey himself. Mickey was just an old lover, the first, admittedly, who taught me some fanciful positions, but whose memory had faded into fuzzy mythology. What I missed was the music, the singing.

Onstage with everyone watching, I'd felt like somebody. I could make sad people feel better and lonely people understand they weren't really alone.

What I did back then mattered. I couldn't convince myself that Houston mattered. I mean, dozens of people tell you that motherhood is the most important job on earth. And I bought the line the first ten years. I truly believed I was forming future grown-ups. Only now, with the girls impatiently charging into adolescence, my part in the formation process seemed over. I found myself shifted into a nothing-but-a-job stance—maid, cook, chauffeur and, on Saturday nights after the news, weather, and sports, whore. I'd become the woman I made fun of. A thought surfaced:
I goddamn wasn't born to be a stereotype.

For the first time in years—at least since I saw the
M*A*S*H
where Colonel Blake got killed—tears welled up on the inside corners of my eyes. No one needed me anymore. I felt like eating a candy bar. Squeezing both eyes shut, I doubled my fists and said, “Shit.”

“Mama,” droned to an end, and, after a Midas Muffler commercial, Emmylou came on singing “Play Pretend.” Her voice rose so pure and holy, like running water in the mountains. Eyes still closed, I leaned back on both hands and straightened my legs. I sang quietly, just above a whisper.

“Let's play pretend, that you still love me

I'll act as though you will always be here

The kids will believe that we are still happy

If you play pretend, that you always will care.”

In some three-two bar, I think it was Okmulgee, Oklahoma, I remember a boy at the first table behind the dance floor. He looked fourteen or fifteen, I don't know how he got in the bar so young, but I was sixteen and too young myself so maybe no one cared. This boy had real short, dark hair and blue eyes that never left me the whole first set.

I sang a few Patsy songs, “Walkin' After Midnight,” “I Fall to Pieces,” “A Poor Man's Roses,” and did some backups on Choosie's “My-Wife-Done-Left-and-I'm-Gonna-Get-Drunk” standards. With each song, this boy flashed deeper and deeper into what must have been one hell of a religious experience. His face glowed like lit neon, his eyes practically shot sparks at me, I swear he didn't breathe for forty-five minutes.

Who knows what really happened? Maybe someone slipped him some redneck version of LSD and the kid saw me as Mother Nature reborn with a microphone in her hand. I was somewhat embarrassed and somewhat flattered. I mean, the whole place was watching this kid watch me.

We finished the set with “Tennessee Waltz” and, as Choosie went into “Pause for the cause, don't forget your bartenders and waitresses,” I looked over at the boy. Tears streamed like when a rubber washer on an old faucet busts loose. His hairless chin dribbled. The boy's blue eyes shimmered in a saved-at-the-revival, basking-in-the-Promised-Land look of lost focus.

Mickey came up beside me. “What the hell did you do to that one?”

“I don't know.”

“You'd think he never saw a twat before.”

“Maybe he likes the way I sing.”

Mickey laughed and spit onstage. We went out to the van for Johnnie Walker Red and when we came back in, the boy had disappeared.

• • •

“What're you doing, Mama?” Cassie stood by the door in her white flannel nightgown and long hair. For just a moment, I thought I was looking at myself.

“I'm thinking about the old days.”

“When you were in the band?”

“Yes.”

Cassie came in and sat on the edge of the end table with both hands folded in her lap. “Do you miss being in the band?”

“It was a hard life.” I reached over and switched off the radio.

“Do you ever wish you'd stayed on the road?”

“No.” I got off the floor and Cassie and I went to the kitchen in search of ice cream.

• • •

Closer to two months than one later, Roxanne called on a Saturday morning. I was drinking coffee at the breakfast nook, trying to schedule my day. The problem lay in dry cleaning. Cassie's riding lesson ran from noon to two-thirty, with Connie's tennis class from two to three. That left me with time for my Cambodian cooking school at twelve-thirty, but only if I drove the south side loop like an amphetamine-crazed astronaut.

However, it didn't leave time to buy groceries and pick up Ron's lucky cardigan at the dry cleaners. Ron was supposed to play golf in the morning and I knew both our days would be shot if I didn't bring home his lucky sweater. It was a sky-blue button-up with a reindeer on the back. Ron wore it because he'd once lucked in an eagle with it on. Also, he thought the sweater looked nonpretentious. Ron spent a lot of time and money on not looking pretentious at the country club.

The phone rang and Roxanne started right in. “He's in town. What're you going to do, Lannie?”

“I think I'll skip cooking class and pick up the dry cleaning. Who's in town?”

“It's rodeo week and I drank T'n'Ts at the Bowie Knife last night. Who do you think is in town?”

“Mickey?”

“The old pill popper himself. He wants to see you. I think the boy still carries a lump for you, Lannie, after all these years.”

“Hides it pretty well if he does. I didn't realize you even knew the Mick.”

Roxanne laughed—a sound like cutting cardboard with a butter knife. “Hell, me and Mickey Thunder go way back. How you figure he knew your address and phone number ever' time you and the dentist moved?”

“I thought he looked in the phone book.”

“Wrong, my little housewife. Me and Galen drove over in his pickup to two-step last night and during the break, old Mickey walked up, sat at our table—pissed Galen off no end—and asked all about you. Seemed real interested in what the years have done to your body.”

“How dare you call me a housewife?”

Roxanne shrieked again. “Which one of us is nursing a hangover and swollen thighs and which one of us can't decide if she ought to skip cooking class to pick up the dry cleaning?”

“Fuck yourself, Roxanne.”

• • •

Roxanne's housewife crack pissed me off so much I didn't pick up the dry cleaning or make Cambodian cooking school. Instead, I pulled into a Tex-Mex drive-in on Hanover Boulevard and ate three of the greasiest enchiladas in Houston. The carhop had a pimple on her neck as big as Ron's class ring.

On the way to the stables, I daydreamed about hot fudge and creamed marshmallows on graham crackers. My sugar binges often begin as dessert fantasies. The daydream should have sounded a
Look out, Lana Sue
alarm in my head, but I doubt if it did.

Cassie stood by the driveway in her riding boots and Western wear jacket. Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail so she looked like a fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in
National Velvet.

“A man was looking for you,” Cassie said.

“What man?”

“There he is.”

Mickey Thunder stepped from behind a hand-painted blue-panel truck with Tennessee plates. “Hi, Lana Sue.”

It's odd to go around expecting something every day for years and then all of a sudden it happens. I didn't feel anything. “Hi, Mick.” I opened the door but didn't get out.

He held out his hands. “Aren't you going to give your old buddy a squeeze?”

“I don't know.” We stared at each other a moment. The years hadn't changed Mickey a bit. Same gray skin stretched over the same knobby skull. Same straight, combed-over-his-ears hair. If Mickey had gained any weight, I couldn't see where. He was still the boy who all that lifetime ago had asked me if I was a cocktease.

“Your cousin told me you'd be here.”

“Sweet of her to do that.” I looked at Cassie. She stood by the front bumper, watching with no expression on her face—as if Mickey and I were on a television set.

I motioned in her direction. “This is my daughter, Cassie. Cassie, this is Michael Rossitelli.”

“Call me Mickey.”

“Mom's told me about you.”

Mickey's eyes stayed on mine. “Don't believe anything she said.”

I sat with both hands on the wheel, considering a way to deal with events. There didn't seem to be any middle ground between ignoring him and hustling him into the nearest motel. I wasn't sure which I wanted, but Cassie standing next to the car appeared to pre-answer the question.

Mickey came up a step and rested one hand on top of my door. “Lacy's got throat cancer.”